


A Quiet War

by Molly



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Friendship, M/M, Slash, dissertation, sentinel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-21
Updated: 2008-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-02 00:45:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Molly/pseuds/Molly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>In which Jim and Blair misunderstand one another on almost every level, leading to much angst and suffering and then, eventually, less suffering, and then breakfast. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A Quiet War

**Author's Note:**

> This story sprang from my head full-formed after viewing a Sentinel vid, _Walking on a Wire_ by Sandy, Jo, and Rache, on Media Cannibals tape 4. Sadly, it is not online for linking. But it was fab and my world is a better place for it!

_"It's been a quiet war, behind closed doors / Ain't it getting hard to keep your balance anymore..."_

\--Lowen &amp; Navarro, _Walking on a Wire_

  
   


* * *

  
   


**I.**

"Jesus, Sandburg. Don't you sleep?"

The question filtered in through my ears and very nearly filtered out through my fingers. I stopped typing just in time to keep from adding Jim's question to the end of my last sentence. I skipped up to the top of the paragraph and scanned down, checking for incoherence and misplaced commas. Things looked good.

"I slept."

"When?"

Looking up at Jim, I grinned. "Yesterday."

Things were looking good on the outside of the laptop display, too. Sunlight poured through the windows, hitting Jim just right. Nobody looked like Jim looked standing in the sun. Morning was kind to the guy, maybe too kind. I had to look away.

"Coffee's not too old." I examined the page on the screen in front of me, like it might have changed while Jim had my attention.

"Want some?"

"That's the second pot."

"You're lucky this stuff's legal."

Behind me, coffee-fixing sounds ensued. Jim pulled a mug out of the cabinet, administered cream, and stirred. Good sounds. When I was a kid, Naomi used to get up and make coffee on cold mornings, loading mine up with milk and sugar. Listening to it, smelling it, that was the sensory imprint of home for me. That it was Jim back there, bringing it all together--it put a solid warmth in my chest. I could almost hear him considering eggs, deciding against it. The fridge opened, and a bag crinkled. Yesterday's muffins.

I grinned. I was pretty deeply imprinted.

He brought his breakfast over and sat down across from me. I watched him over the rim of my glasses, trying not to make a big deal of it, but he saw me watching and he watched me back, smiling out of the corner of his mouth. He had his blue robe wrapped tight around him like a security blanket, and it occurred to me then that I hadn't turned the heat on yet, and it was warmer up there in Jim's bedroom than it was down here. It always was.

"Sorry." I waved my hand at the cold room. "I got going, and...."

"Forgot you were cold."

"Hey, I was cold, but chapter one was smokin'."

"You really stayed up all night working on that thing?"

Something in his voice made me take a closer look at him. His smile was still in place, but it hung wrong on his mouth.

"I didn't set out to. I couldn't sleep."

"Did you try?"

I closed the lid of the laptop and pushed it aside. He watched me from across the table, his hands wrapped around each other in front of him. White-knuckled.

"Jim, what's going on?"

"What... I mean, what were you writing? You just came downstairs, and I'm up there sleeping like a baby while you're out here dissecting my brain?"

I blinked, and leaned back in my chair. "You really think I'm a total asshole, don't you."

"I don't think you're an asshole. I'm just asking a God damn question, Sandburg--"

"We've been through this. I thought you understood--"

"I do understand. I understand you have to write it, I just don't see how you can come down here and do it right after--"

"Right after what, Jim?"

His face went white, then red. He looked away, his lips pressed together all thin and pale. He didn't say anything because there were rules to this thing that had happened between us, and that was the first rule.

I could detach from it a little now, more than I could at first. Watch it from the outside. We fit into each other's lives in certain specific, concrete roles that only functioned smoothly as long as we didn't say anything about it out loud. I could think about it in terms of taboos and mores and norms now, finally. I could be an anthropologist about it.

I had to be.

"Can I have one of those muffins?"

He passed me the bag, careful not to touch me accidentally.

"I was writing about the physical processes that operate during normal sleep," I said. An olive branch, with a white flag tied to the end of it. "I've got a theory about why it is you don't wake up every time a car rolls by outside. If you want to hear about it, I'm happy to tell you, but you'll be bored out of your mind, man. Truth."

"You just caught me off guard."

"Jim--I'm not just an observer here, okay? In case you hadn't noticed, I've gone a little native."

"I'm not upset, Sandburg."

"Right."

He rolled up his napkin and threw it at me. Badly; it sailed right over my shoulder.

"I'm not picking that up," I said.

"I'm really not upset. You just... you caught me off guard."

I looked at him carefully. He met my eyes willingly, and if he wasn't actually okay he was putting on a pretty good act. "Really?"

"You want me to get it notarized?"

"Okay." I nodded. "Okay, that's good. Because--"

"Don't you have a class or something...?"

It took ten minutes to shower and throw on some clothes. Sometime while I was in the bathroom, Jim took off for the station; when I came out, there was a nobody-home silence hanging in the air. I pulled on jeans from what I hoped was the clean pile, a green t-shirt, and my leather jacket. It was supposed to warm up a little, a few degrees over way-too-fucking-cold, so I passed on the extra layer of flannel. I shaved fast, checked myself for blood, then spent fifteen minutes hunting for my keys.

I was on my way out the door, calculating bus schedules, when I caught sight of them--right beside the basket, not where I'd left them, on top of a hand-written note. Jim-scrawl offered hopes I was awake enough to teach, along with instructions on when to show up at the station.

Twelve-thirty was earlier than we'd talked about, but I'd forgotten about the Walker interview and I'd forgotten about the Anthro department staff meeting and so I'd have maybe five minutes to make it from Hargrove Hall to the station.

I was fucked. Mentally I scratched the staff meeting off my to-do list. I'd take the heat later.

My car started with an even purr, and I took a second to close my eyes and send a telepathic thank-you to Iris. She'd come very close to murdering me, but her brother did a hell of an overhaul on the Volvo.

All's well that ends well.

My class didn't start till ten-thirty, but I had an office-hour before it. I snagged a Styrofoam cup of black coffee in the lounge and snuck past the secretary's desk. Doctor Flanagan, a guy with white hair and tenure and a total lack of respect for the epic tragedy of my workload, looked up as I passed his open door.

"Sandburg! To what do we owe this singular honor?"

I leaned in and propped up his door frame with my shoulder. "I forgot you'd be here. I really gotta start marking these things on my calendar."

"We all thought you'd quit. Certain members of the secretarial staff became quite distraught."

"You know, I haven't missed a class in two months. For an anthropologist, you're not really all that observant."

"I'm a theorist. Will your little friend be joining you later?"

I grinned. "Jim's at the station all day today. What, is Valerie bringing the twins in?"

"Cody's fascination with law enforcement continues unabated, I'm afraid."

"Mine, too," I said, and waved as I pushed off the door.

"Say hi to Tracy on your way through. She missed you more than all the rest combined."

I rolled my eyes and flipped him off.

My desk was a wreck. I had to spend ten minutes filing before I could sit down to work. No students came in; papers and exams were still a month off--an eternity in freshman-speak, practically science fiction. Tracy knocked at the open door just as I got the laptop powered on.

"Tracy," I said evenly. "Hi."

"Did you put a mark on the roster for your coffee?"

Fifteen cents for black, twenty-five with cream and sugar. "I, uh."

She stuck out a hand, tipped with blood-red nails. "Fifteen cents."

"I don't have any change."

"I'll take a check."

"I didn't bring my checkbook."

"Then I guess you're going to have to go put a mark on the roster, aren't you?" She smiled, and the air got ten degrees colder.

I shuffled out to show my compliance, edging past her like she might bite if I got too close. Probably she would. She watched from her desk as I flipped the pages in the coffee log.

I put a mark next to Doctor Flanagan's name, and slunk back to my desk with a sense of dark victory. There's just something fascist about having to pay for office coffee.

Sydney showed up at ten-fifteen, just as I was packing up for the hike across campus. Fifteen classrooms per floor in Hargrove Hall, all of them currently devoted to the science of physics. Classes had been shuffled around in anticipation of a departmental move to a newer, nicer building two uphill football fields away--an under-construction building, currently lagging six months behind schedule. Sydney's smiling arrival meant two things to me; he'd read my intro chapter, and I was gonna to be extremely late.

"Hey, Sydney. Want to sit?"

"No, no." He waved off the offer of a chair and leaned against my doorjamb, his thumbs hooked into tweed pockets. "Just wanted to see how things were coming."

"Things are fine." I looked at my watch while trying not to look like I was looking. Very, extremely late.

"I missed you at our meeting on Friday."

"I can explain that, Sydney. It's just that I was--"

"At the police station. Catch any crooks?"

I grinned, and leaned back in my chair. "All of 'em. The cops have shut the place down."

"I read your intro."

"Cool." And so much for small talk. "Did you like the part about the link between enhanced endorphin production and the zone-out state?"

"I liked the part that wasn't coffee-stained. I thought the actual conclusions were stretching a bit, but in the overall scheme of things, it's not any more ridiculous than any other introduction to any other dissertation I've ever read."

"Thanks. I really mean that."

"I want chapter one by the end of the November. I know that's fast, but if you want to defend by April you're on a very tight schedule."

"End of the month? I know I'm under deadline, Syd, but that's pretty draconian, don't you think? I just handed you the intro last Monday. And the writing, to be honest, isn't going as fast as it usually does." The writing had, in fact, stalled completely on several occasions, but I wasn't about to say that to Sydney. I didn't even much like saying that to myself.

He grinned, and lifted his form from off my door. "You're the one who set the deadline, Blair. I just hold you to it."

"I hate myself."

"Work it out in therapy."

  
   


* * *

  
   


Not-writing had gotten to be kind of like a game to me. I'd done almost four years of it, and I was very, very good. There are approximately three hundred and eighty two ways to avoid writing in your average American household, and I'd tried them all. I'd even tried some of the ones that had to do with cleaning. There was this one week I swear Jim would've loved to take my temperature, and he looked at me like there was every possibility I'd been replaced by an identical imposter. Jim thinks he's pretty hot with the cleaning, but he wasn't raised by Naomi Sandburg. It's not common knowledge, but a commune can be a really sterile place. Especially after she's been there for like, ten minutes.

So, the writing was... kind of random. Some nights I wrote like I'd sold my soul to the muse of Anthropology, and some nights I won nine out of every ten games of FreeCell. It wasn't that I didn't want to write; I just sometimes couldn't make the words fit together. Staring at a blank page for an hour is the closest I've ever come to a true meditation experience; you look at one of those long enough, it starts to look back--in a way that lets you know it ain't impressed.

I resorted to dating to pick up some of the slack, see if I could fire some creative juices, among other things. Jim and I both hit a surprising vein of good luck one night when Windows ate my modem settings and tried to convince me I lived in the Central time zone.

Unfortunately, it was the same vein of luck for both of us.

I met Karen Fisher over the phone. She was a support specialist for cascadia.com. She walked me through a quick-repair I was too lazy to dig out of the manual, and stayed on the line afterwards, just to chat.

Jim met Karen Fisher when she came over to install the DSL line she'd talked me into. When she walked in, he closed the November issue of _Field and Stream_ and came up off the couch like he'd found a reason to live.

The speed with which she shifted her attentions was a lot less than flattering. A few phone conversations and one account upgrade didn't make for a timeless passion or anything, but hell, she was fun to talk to and besides, she knew all my passwords. She was kind of petite for Jim, kind of non-exotic for his tastes--pretty, in an understated way, with big brown eyes and honey-blond hair down to her shoulders. He didn't seem to be worrying about his type; his eyes picked up extra wattage the second she walked in the door.

"You must be Karen. Nice to finally meet you. I hear you're going to be turning Blair into even more of a computer geek than he is already. I'm Jim."

She grinned up at him as he took her hand. Without even looking at me, she said, "This is the guy you were telling me about on the phone?"

"Uh. Yeah."

"He doesn't look old and embittered to me."

Jim looked up, eyebrows scaling his forehead. I grinned weakly, shrugged, and closed my eyes.

They flirted. I was more or less cool with that, mostly because watching Jim try to flirt was kind of like watching an elephant try to fly--not the most graceful act in the circus, but still pretty entertaining from the stands. Karen waited until Jim went upstairs to change for his shift to pull me aside.

"Blair...."

"Hey. This is not a problem, Kare, honest."

"You're okay with it? God, I feel like such a ho."

"Just go easy on him, huh? He hasn't been himself since the accident, but if he keeps taking his meds he should be fine."

"Blair!"

"Did I mention his family history of criminal insanity?"

She socked me one on the arm, grinned, and got started on my installation.

I grinned. I was okay with it, mostly. I hadn't had anything invested. Whatever made Jim smile, you know? There was this twinge when I saw them with their heads together, laughing, and I honestly couldn't say which one I was jealous of.

When she left, she gave me a hug. I pulled out of it quick, because Jim was watching, and smiled at her. "Well, that was fun."

"Sorry, Blair. You know it's not you, right?"

"That's what they all say. Then they date Jim, and after a few weeks they come crawling back, crying and begging. It's kind of sad, actually."

"I love you for your rich fantasy life."

"I'm tellin' you, Kare, this place is a vale of tears."

She hugged me again, kissed me on the cheek, and let go. "I'll be seeing you around."

When the door was closed and locked behind her, Jim turned and smacked the side of my head with his magazine.

"Hey!"

"'Crying and begging,' Chief? I'll show you a vale of tears...."

A couple days after that Karen stopped by the station to take us out for lunch. That night we all piled into the truck, her in the middle, and headed out to the Dollar Cinema on Lakeshore to see the X-Files movie. I kept my mouth shut from long experience; you can mess with Jim about a lot of things, but you don't slam the X-Files while it's on if you have any kind of a will to live. I rolled my eyes a lot, and got dropped off early for my trouble.

The next time Karen suggested we all do something together, I caught Jim splashing on Old Spice after his shave.

I grinned at him, and he grinned back--looking about fifteen, all awkward and flushed and pleased with himself. "Workin' hard," I said.

"How do I look?"

"Like kind of a big goof. And besides that, you smell like my granddad."

"He must've scored at least once in his life, right? Otherwise, where'd you come from?"

"His conquests were legion, back in the day." I leaned against the doorframe, and watched him comb his hair. "So. Karen, huh? Not really your speed, is she?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know." I shrugged. "She's nice."

He flipped me off in the mirror. "I like nice girls, sometimes, Sandburg."

"You like girls who want to end your life in strange and exciting ways."

"The romance is young. We can do that part later." He turned around to face me. "Well?"

"You look good." And he did; he looked so good I had to force the words out. A black t-shirt and blue jeans and probably his leather jacket, later; his hair was still wet from the shower and even smelling like my granddad he made it hard for me to breathe. "So, I guess... she's pretty special. To you, I mean."

Jim's eyes slid away from mine, and he shrugged. "I like her. It's been a while since I felt like I had a shot at... you know. Something normal." He waved a hand at his head, which I took as a comment on his senses. "You think any sane woman would put up with this?"

"I pretty much think she'd be crazy not to, Jim."

"That's... thanks, Sandburg."

"No charge, man."

He looked so surprised at the compliment, I wanted to say it again. He just went through his life like this, expecting the worst, expecting to be too much trouble or too much effort or just--I don't know, maybe just too much. It hurt to think about what kind of life he must've had as a kid, to make him think like that. I looked at him, standing there with that crazy expression. Like he was nervous, but toughing it out anyway because that's what Ellisons do.

I wanted to hug him, or ruffle his hair, or do something else equally moronic. I wanted to let him know he was worth whatever effort hanging with him took.

Instead, I developed a sudden, vicious stomach virus. It kept me home for the evening and vanished, mysteriously, the second they were out the door. Jim didn't come home early enough to talk that night, but he left a heart-felt thank-you on my voice mail.

That was the end of the threesome. It was the end of me and Jim for awhile, too; I moved into the land of the looming deadline, and Jim, for all practical purposes, moved into the station. When he wasn't working, which wasn't often, he was with Karen. I don't know what they did, but Jim was still sleeping at home. They seemed to spend a lot of time at the movies.

I missed him. I missed him a hell of a lot. You could get used to having somebody around, like you could get used to a favorite shirt or a comfortable couch.

I ignored it. The odds against Jim in any romantic scenario were monumentally high, and I'd watched enough of them crash and burn to know the drill by heart. I crossed my fingers for him, buried myself in work, and hoped he didn't hurt himself too badly.

Sydney's deadline was on my mind twenty-four seven. It was getting past time to prove I was actually doing some research and not just tooling around with cops because I thought they were cool. Wanting to write and needing to write had combined to form a sense of doom that hung over me and the loft most nights like something from a scary movie. Which made it almost impossible to write, at least with any reasonable degree of skill.

The introductory chapter that had freaked Jim so bad was nothing more Jim-related than a week's effort at explaining why my single research subject was so astoundingly not-forthcoming about all the stuff I was supposed to be finding out about him. Fear of intimacy, territoriality, etc, etc, ad nauseam; it all boiled down to me whining about the conditions of the research and begging pathetically for more time.

That time was up. Now they wanted meat. Videotape, tests, charts. The works. All that stuff I didn't have because Jim didn't like having a camera stuck in his face and thought tests were boring and didn't believe the Essential Jim Ellison could be charted. There wasn't anything I could do about the videotape short of spending a week with Jim and a camera, and that wasn't gonna happen; I let it go, and concentrated on the rest. Truth? I was kind of glad Kare had taken him off my hands for a while. I would've wrapped him up in a bow if she'd asked. Anything for some quiet.

I didn't really have any tests I could show my committee. A couple from the beginning, yeah, but even those weren't performed under what you'd call rigorous scientific conditions. It was fine for me to drop some vanilla in a cup and call it a test, but the kitchen wasn't a lab and I didn't have any control subjects and anyway, I hadn't actually written any of that down. The only alternative was to hand in a chapter that was basically a work of fiction, and I wasn't really sure I could do that. Anything I produced would have about as much resemblance to science as a Michael Crichton novel. I didn't think having a 'based on' warning in my end notes was going to cut any ice with Sydney.

I spent about two weeks worrying about the ethics of the situation. Jim's safety, my lack of objectivity, scientific accuracy--my career, my whole future, was all mixed up in that. On Friday, Karen and Jim brought groceries in.

Jim shelved them silently, careful not to look at me. I closed my laptop when Karen came up to look over my shoulder.

"Top secret stuff, huh?" She tugged at my pony-tail, which actually kind of hurt.

"Hey. Hands off the merchandise. You'll make my partner jealous."

"You never actually said what you were writing about. Let me guess: it's a study of the secret sex lives of metropolitan cops."

In the kitchen, Jim dropped a box of Frosted Flakes.

I grinned. "Well, yeah. Actually. How'd you guess?"

"C'mon, let me read it. I can keep a secret."

"I'm sworn to secrecy, Kare. Thin blue line, and all that."

"Sandburg, would you get off that already? Jesus."

"I didn't create the phenomenon, Jim. That's on you and your brothers in blue."

"Ignore him, Karen. I only let him stay here out of pity."

"Yeah." I rolled my eyes so Karen could see. "Pity and a binding lease agreement."

"Plus, he can cook," Jim said. I turned and looked at him; he was grinning, warm and sweet, looking right back at me.

I kept my eyes off Jim after that, but just having him there, hearing him move around in the kitchen behind me, it made things clearer. Jim's safety, scientific accuracy--and that lack of objectivity that put the two into perspective.

On some level the decision had already been made.

The third week I spent typing. Writing isn't hard. It's all about focus. On the fourth week, I turned in chapter one of the biggest bullshit-job of my life.

Jim waited for me downstairs with the engine running while I jogged up three flights to the Anthro offices. I tossed the chapter onto Sydney's desk with a yellow sticky note telling him what it was, and got out of there before I had to actually talk to anybody in the department. I felt guilty just walking past Tracy. Letting go of that binder felt like letting go of a limb.

The windows were fogged up; Jim wasn't running the defrost. Said the fan was making an annoying sound. Climbing into the truck was like climbing into a cocoon, and I wondered if that was how Jim saw it. Just the two of us in this whole sentinel thing together, sealed up and invisible. Simon knew, Megan knew, but neither of them had that much to say about it. I don't think Jim really thought much about the fact that my committee also knew, that they had a _lot_ to say, that there was a lot I was required to say to _them_. We didn't talk about it, except those times he felt the need to snipe at me for treating him like my walking ticket to the Ivory Tower.

He didn't take us into the traffic right away. Just sat there, staring out the opaque window like it wasn't even there. Rain sheeted down the windshield in front of me, barely visible; I was cold, and I'd brought as much water in as I'd left outside. The cab smelled faintly of wet leather and flowery perfume.

I reached out to turn on the heat--he could put up with a little noise if it meant I could start to feel my toes again--and he stopped me. He wrapped his fingers around my fingers and held on to them, still looking out the window. An image formed in my mind of the last night we'd spent together--before Karen, before the crush of work and writing. At the end of it he'd held onto my hand just like this.

His hand was colder than mine, but together they got warmer. I didn't pull away; didn't breathe much, either. He held on so tight it hurt, but I didn't pull away, and it wasn't just our hands, not just my hand anyway. Everything was getting warmer. Hands, truck, world. Everything.

"How many chapters?" he asked.

The heat drained away. And I wasn't breathing for a different reason now, past loving the way his fingers felt wrapped around mine, into something treacherous and invisible between us. I got light-headed.

"Just the one," I said. "You saw me type it up."

"I mean altogether, Sandburg."

He turned and looked at me, and my chest tightened up. His eyes were closed off, nothing but slate walls. I was certain I didn't want to know what was going on behind them.

"How many chapters altogether, when it's finished?"

"Six." I swallowed nothing. "Six, if I follow the outline."

Jim nodded, looking distant, abstracted. Gone. "Let me know," he said. "When you're done, I mean."

I looked back out the windshield where I couldn't see a thing and tried not to think. Jim flipped on the radio, threw us into drive and pulled out of the parking space, out of the lot, into university traffic.

"We could stop for dinner. You hungry?"

"Not really." I'd had a turkey and cheese sandwich for lunch, half of one anyway; it had been pretty good, but it was riding on my stomach like rocks. "Grab something at home."

"We can stop and pick something up. My treat, I know you're tapped."

"No thanks," I said. "Really, Jim. I'm fine."

  
   


* * *

  
   


Home.

I walked in the door and felt better instantly because I was home, because I could smell the stuff Jim uses to clean the floors and lasagna from last night, which I'd burned pretty badly on the bottom but which had been just fine on the top. I went into my room and dropped my jacket and backpack on the bed I hadn't made, deposited pocket change on top of my dresser. I changed my t-shirt, damp from the rain, for a warm and dry one, then looked around at my stuff, which was just basic stuff but special because it was mine. I thought about Jim.

And about the paper. Because on some level, I knew he thought they were one and the same. Inextricably linked.

Jim and the paper, the paper and me, me and Jim, and this place. Home. Six chapters to go before the pattern we'd settled into could be broken. I wiped my hands, suddenly slick and cold, against my jeans. Six chapters and I'd be out from under the deadline, I could breathe again. Six chapters, and we were home free.

I planned to write fast.

In the kitchen I discovered the cupboard was bare. It had been a busy week for both of us, and the loft was just a pleasant memory more often than not. I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes, trying to remember the number for the pizza place at the corner of Prospect and Market.

I heard Jim before I felt him, standing close and warm, a heat-signature against the left side of my body. When he reached out for my hand I felt the motion and looked up at him.

The first touch was never about sex. Not the first time, not this time, not any other time between. I don't even think it was about me. There was a lot of Jim Ellison in it, though--something was going on in there. He just kind of put out his hand, looked at it as it hung there between us. I looked at it, too--Jim has good hands. Strong, but the fingers are long and the bones slide beneath skin that's so pale, it's almost vampiric. I looked at his hand and then I looked up at his eyes and found him looking at mine--pale blue mirrors reflecting me back at myself so in a way, looking into his eyes was like looking back into mine. I wondered if he saw what I saw, or if the image was somehow inverted for him. Wondered what I looked like from his side of that connection.

He didn't look like he was planning to move. Still Life with Ellison. I put my hand out where his was, in that weird, quiet space between us, and that was the first touch.

He blinked at me, all wide-eyed, like he hadn't expected it. I had to smile. I mean, what did he expect me to do? When have I ever left him out there like that?

Jim doesn't reach, except on those rare occasions when he does, and on those occasions you better believe I reach back. My hand looked funny next to his--I'm the academic and he's the man on the street, you know? But I was the one with the calluses.

He took a funny kind of breath when I fitted my hand into his. I could feel the lines in his palm. I could've told his future, if I were brave enough.

"Rough day," I said, pulling my hand back. He pulled back right after. He closed his eyes once, then opened them again, and the lines at the corners of them went deep.

"Got a talent for understatement," he said, smiling.

I crossed my arms over my chest. Looked at him some more. He stood there and took it; he was used to it. I guess by that time we both were. I could see him filling the moat and raising the drawbridge; his shoulders were straight as a level, chin up and out. His smile was utter bullshit; I knew it, and he knew I knew it, but he did it anyway and I smiled back anyway and my smile was bullshit too, if slightly more self-aware bullshit than his.

"I was going to make us a couple ham and cheese sandwiches," I said, waving my hand at the empty countertop, "but I ran into a little problem."

"No ham?"

"Or cheese. And that's not even mentioning the complete and total lack of bread."

"I thought we had bread."

"We had Frankenbread, man. It was green. With fur. All we needed was lightning and a slab."

"So much for dinner," Jim said. "Got an alternate plan, Igor?"

"Yeah." I shoved off the counter and put myself in front of him. "You order pizza."

His grin flashed out at me like a knife. "Oh, _I_ order it."

"Yeah." I grinned back at him, and made sure my knees stayed locked. "And then we eat."

"That's brilliant, Sandburg."

I nodded. "And then you tell me what the fuck is going on with you."

Understanding hit him spine first and he went military straight long before his face tightened up. You can take the soldier out of the Army, right? His eyes looked through me like I was made of glass. I hated it when he did that, when I could see him turning down the old Sandburg dial in his head. At that point, anything I said would hiss like empty static.

It wasn't the touching, though there'd been enough of that. It wasn't the looks or the silences. It was the way all of it fit together, a slow and basic change in the way Blair Sandburg got handled behind Jim's eyes. It made me nervous, it scared me, and it made me angry in a weird, mind-fucked kind of way. I liked the time before my dissertation turned into a wall between us, the time when it was just us doing the stuff we did and doing it great. The time when being together wasn't work.

I wanted it back.

He didn't move because he couldn't, because I was right in front of him and to move he'd have to acknowledge my existence by detouring around me. On a better day I might've had a little fun waiting him out, but this wasn't a better day, it was this day, and I wasn't in the mood. I had a deadline.

I didn't need this.

So I shoved him. He wasn't braced for it, and he went down. It felt good, in a really ugly way; it got my pulse going, got the adrenaline into my veins. I hated how good it felt, but it was worth it just for the look on his face.

"Sandburg, what the hell--"

"Sorry," I said easily. I reached down to give him a hand up. "Thought you were zoning."

"Bullshit. Since when do you knock me on my ass to bring me out of a zone?"

"Since when do you shut me off like the weekly top forty?"

He took my hand, squeezing it harder than he had to. I took the pain as payment and pulled him to his feet. He glared at me, hard-eyed, but I was _there_ to him, I had the man's attention. Jim Ellison, front and center, listening. He rubbed the wrist he'd caught himself with. "Since when do you knock anybody over for anything?"

"Let me see that."

He let me take his arm and move his wrist through its usual range of motion; he only winced a little when I pushed back on it. I let off the pressure immediately, avoiding his eyes. "I shouldn't have pushed you."

"It's not that bad."

"We'll wrap it. Don't use it much today, it'll be fine."

"We don't have to wrap it."

"We're going to wrap it," I said, breathing hard. I didn't know I'd shouted till I saw his eyes widen and his hands come up. "Sorry," I said again. I meant it. After a second, he nodded and followed me into the bathroom.

I sat on the edge of the tub and he sat on the john. He was longer in the torso than me, so he looked a lot taller like that. I pulled the first aid kit out from under the sink, an ugly green tackle box filled with antibiotic ointments and Band-Aids instead of flies and lures. My hands shook as I unwound an Ace bandage, and I couldn't look him in the eye. I wrapped his wrist with it--gently, not too tight, I was good at this--and made sure it wasn't cutting off his circulation.

He watched me all the way through my EMT impersonation. I kept my eyes on my work, but I could feel him studying me like there was going to be a quiz later. When I was finished, he thanked me and left the bathroom and called Tonio's for pizza. He didn't have to ask what I wanted on my half.

Forty-five minutes later we were eating; half an hour after that, we shut off the lights, checked the locks, and went upstairs. I didn't mention Karen, and he didn't either. Maybe they were so new it didn't count yet, or maybe this was it for us, for now. When he touched me, it didn't make any difference.

I made love to him like I'd never done it before.

Like I'd never do it again.

Like always.

It was an hour of dark silence, and when we were through I gathered my clothes and went back downstairs to my room.

We didn't talk about it. We never did.

_Break the silence, break the spell._

**II.**

Every year, I get a flu shot. It's just a thing I do. Every year, the department secretary sends around a memo sometime in October and a week later a van shows up and a bunch of nurses hop out to set up shop in the lobby. I don't worry much about getting the flu, but I'm kind of fond of nurses.

Jim doesn't get a flu shot anymore. I still have flashbacks from the first time. I don't like riding to the hospital in the back of an ambulance while my roommate goes into anaphylactic shock. It hadn't occurred to me that a guy who ate eggs five days a week for breakfast could have an allergic reaction to a simple flu shot--it was a wake-up call. Scared the hell out of me. I got a lot more careful after that.

Karen doesn't get a flu shot, either. I don't know why; maybe her office doesn't send a memo. Whatever her reasons for living dangerously, I didn't consider them good enough--which is what I told Jim when he called me at ten p.m. on a Tuesday just before finals, wanting me to go make sure she was still breathing.

"C'mon, Sandburg. She's young and pretty and she needs your help. Don't you have any chivalric impulses at all?"

I thought about it for two seconds. I thought about how warm the loft was now that I'd turned the heater up past Arctic and how hard it was raining outside and how good it was going to feel to take a shower. I thought about all the work I had to do before I could go to sleep and how few hours there were between me and morning.

"No." I shook my head at the phone. "None whatsoever."

"Did I mention she's pretty?"

"I saw her first, Jim; I know what she looks like. More importantly, to me anyway, I know what you'd make _me_ look like if I started to care what she looks like. Besides, if she's as sick as you say she is, right now her looks are probably not a selling point. Why don't you go check on her?"

"I can't. I'm on stakeout duty till four a.m."

"Get Rafe or Henry to cover for you."

"They just went off stakeout duty."

"Jim," I said--whined. "Look, I just got home. I'm just starting to get warm, finally. Why can't you ask Simon or Joel?"

"Because," Jim said, calmly, "neither of them is my best friend."

"Would one of them like to be?" I slumped against the wall, closed my eyes. "Because I hear that position may be opening up."

"Do you need her address?"

Which is how I ended up soaking for the second time in one night, standing at Karen Fisher's door with a bottle of Nyquil in one hand and a box of Mama Bear's Cold Care in the other. The word _sucker_ had taken on a deep and personal meaning for me. Jim, of course, had his umbrella with him, and mine--of course--was in my office. Sixty degrees isn't bad when the sun is shining, but in the dark, with rain pounding down on your head and soaking into your underwear--it's pretty damned cold. In the eternity between me knocking and Karen opening the door, I rededicated my life to making Jim feel my pain.

I heard her behind the door, and leaned in close to the peephole. The chain drew back on the inside, and when she opened the door, I opened my eyes wider and blinked.

"Wow. Jim told me you had the flu; he didn't tell me you were dying of it."

She glared at me with big, glassy brown eyes. "I'm not sick."

I shook my head, and smiled at her. "You're sick, lady. You're practically terminal. Ten minutes later and I'd have to draw a chalk outline."

She sagged against the door frame, rumpled and feverish in a pink fuzzy housecoat. "Do I look that bad?"

I pushed at her shoulder gently, moving us inside and closing the door behind me. "You look like a very pretty girl on the brink of a very ugly death."

"Thanks."

She didn't sound sincere.

Karen's apartment was an affront to all things masculine. There were flowers all over the place--little ones on the wallpaper, big ones on the dining room table (fake, I hoped--for Jim's sake), tiny rose-print-ones on the furniture. Even the things that weren't actually pink or rose-colored gave off a feeling like they wanted to be. The ultra-feminine decor made me feel about ten feet tall and four feet wide. I hunched my shoulders in and followed her into her bedroom, trying really hard not to break anything.

The bedroom made me feel better. Still with the flowers everywhere, but the place looked like it had been ransacked. The bed was rumpled and covered with books; drawers hung out from her dresser with clothes dripping from the corners. The VCR, on a small stand near the foot of the bed, had three Blockbuster tape boxes on top of it; the TV next to it showed a bright blue-screen that clashed with the entire apartment. Her nightstand supported a complete pharmacy of over-the-counter medications, and a trail of tissues led from the bed to an overflowing wastebasket in one corner. An IBM Thinkpad occupied the far side of the bed, along with an assortment of CDs and floppy disks.

Some relationships, you have to look long and hard to see where the cracks are going to form. You have to look at the foundations, knock on the walls, poke around in the wiring. Not so for the Ellison-Fisher alliance. One look at Karen's bedroom said it all.

"Wow. This is one majorly sick sick room."

"I told him not to ask you to come."

"Don't worry." I scanned the room for a place to sit--or, failing that, a place to start cleaning. "He didn't _ask_."

Karen climbed into her bed, which turned out to be a water bed; it sloshed alarmingly when she put her weight on it, and disgorged an occupant I hadn't noticed. A ball of white fluff launched itself from its hiding place in the white down comforter and achieved escape velocity--yowling in fury, totally free of dignity. Karen didn't even blink; I pretended I hadn't noticed.

"Look. You came, you saw. I'm still alive." She waved at the door, an obvious invitation to go. "Tell Jim you did your duty. And don't tell him what I looked like."

"Sure." I nodded, leaning over to grab the trash can. "I'll just dump this on my way out."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Good."

"Fine. See you around."

"Whatever."

I pulled the bedroom door closed behind me.

There was a dismayingly large garbage can in the kitchen; I dumped the smaller one, found a new bag for it, and put it on the floor next to the kitchen table. I checked the pantry--pretty well-stocked, if you liked Campbell's soup and spaghetti, and it was pretty clear Karen liked them both just fine.

While I got familiar with the territory, I tried to imagine Jim in the middle of it. It wasn't hard. The pink was a little much, but the furniture was sturdy and well-made, and everything--everything out here, anyway--was neat and perfectly placed. Once I was sure there wasn't a lot of delicate stuff lying around, just waiting for me to smash into it, I even felt kind of good in Karen's place. It smelled nice. Like spices.

The more I looked around, the more things started to kind of prickle at the back of my mind. Like the fact that the flowers on the table were fake, and there weren't any real ones in the whole apartment. And the fact that the smell in the air was sandalwood, which Jim actually liked, and a little vanilla. Real stuff that had never seen the inside of a spray can. I took a look behind some louvered doors in the hallway and found the washer and dryer; the soap was the same kind Jim and I used at home.

The whole place was Jim-friendly. It was so damn Jim-friendly I started to freak out a little. Take away the frills and I could've been the designer, it was like Martha Stewart's idea of sentinel heaven. And it couldn't have gotten that way by accident, because there was just too much that Karen wouldn't have known to do on her own.

And that--that had to mean Jim had helped her, like I'd helped him in those first couple weeks at the loft. And that had to mean he'd told her, he'd _told_ her and he hadn't told me about telling her, a thought I found more than a little painful right up until I realized it couldn't happen that way. Jim wouldn't do it that way, not without talking to me first. Maybe she was psychic or maybe she was an ex-CIA terrorist or something but I was damn sure Jim hadn't told her anything because Jim wouldn't do that.

Not without talking to me first.

Okay, so, he told Simon. But Simon half-figured it out on his own, right? And Megan did, too, but anyway, they weren't a part of it like we were and they understood that. This was Jim and me, and we didn't tell people, hell, my mother didn't even know. This was ours.

Jim wouldn't break that. He wouldn't.

A clock hung on the wall behind me. It ticked, steady and soft. It ticked off almost a full minute while my mind went in a hundred different directions and my heart did its level best to give me an aneurysm. At the end of that minute I just happened to glance down, between the washer and the dryer, and I saw the special filter for the air conditioning system and all the breath I'd been holding exploded out of me in a thick, hot rush.

_Allergies._

Of course he would've told her he had allergies. That's what he told everybody. That's what we'd planned to tell people, if it ever came to this, to Jim spending a lot of time someplace other than the station, other than home. I'd just never expected that to happen. Most nights you couldn't pry Jim out of the loft with a crowbar, but that was BK, Before Karen, back when a night on the town meant take-out Chinese and maybe a trip to Blockbuster.

_Time flies when you're having the polar opposite of fun_.

I taught myself how to breathe again. My calm and cool facade was a thing of the past. I wiped the palms of my hands against my jeans and forced myself to get a grip.

Karen was just a nice lady looking out for her boyfriend: the guy who couldn't pass a rose-bush or a perfume counter without developing plague symptoms. It was sweet and kind and friendly and all kinds of other good things, and if it was just a little too good to be true--if it was just the fair weather before the inevitable storm--at least I could chill with the knowledge that it'd be a normal kind of storm. The kind that blew in and out of Jim's life with all the comforting predictability of a really good almanac. Jim hadn't done anything drastic and she wasn't using us to steal any government spy planes--a thought which, I'm ashamed to admit, actually crossed my mind.

I found pots and pans in a cabinet by the stove. Going on the theory that nobody who lived alone would buy soup she didn't like, I grabbed the first can I touched and heated it up. She really did look pretty bad; I decided to take her temperature before I fed her. If guilt had something to do with the kind of care I took, it was well-deserved guilt. I considered her a friend; I should've been past the Lee Brackett Memorial Panic Hour.

Fluffy the Wondercat wandered in while I was putting water on for tea, no doubt attracted by the sound of activity near his food dish. He purred hopefully, wrapping himself around my ankle; I found a box of Purina Special Care under the sink, and fed him while I waited for the soup to start bubbling.

"Good cat," I said, reaching down to stroke the fur between his ears. He hissed at me, showing teeth, and I yanked my hand back. Stupid cat never stopped purring.

At Karen's door, tray in hand, I took a deep breath before knocking softly with my foot. I kicked a little louder when she didn't answer, then propped the tray on one arm while carefully opening the door.

She stared at me, her mouth open.

"Hi." I kicked the door shut behind me and smiled my widest. "Dinner!"

"Blair."

"I hope you like vegetable beef soup."

"You were supposed to go home."

I settled the tray over her lap, and stepped back. She looked at me for a moment, then sighed and picked up the spoon.

"Uh-uh." I took it out of her hand and replaced it with the thermometer she'd passed over. "Temp first, then food."

"God. What, you're a nurse now?"

I thought about that for a second. "Kind of," I said. "I volunteer." At the Cascade County Home for the Romantically Doomed.

"Detective, chef, volunteer nurse... what else do you do?"

"In my spare time I've been known to engage in activities actually related to the study of anthropology. Yeah, I know, my thesis committee was pretty stunned, too. You planning to put that in your mouth?"

"Fine, fine...."

After a minute of enforced silence, the thermometer beeped; I tugged it out of her mouth and checked the numbers. I whistled.

"What?"

"Hundred and two. You're definitely sick."

"I'm just tired."

"Yeah," I said, drawing the word out. "'Cause you're sick."

"I'm fine."

"Right. Well, all the same, I'm going to stick around, okay? Someone as _tired_ as you shouldn't be left alone. You could--I don't know, you could fall over or something. You could hit your head."

She looked at me, defeated, and pushed a strand of lank blond hair behind her ear. "Okay. For a while."

"For as long as you need."

"But you've got class tomorrow."

"They're not going to do the reading," I said. "Why should I have to?"

"Everybody should have one of you," she said, and finally smiled a little.

My face got warm. "Good looks, native wit, and charm."

"Well, yeah. But how about the thing with you being a pretty decent guy?"

"I can fish, too."

She grinned, and picked up her spoon again.

While she ate, I wandered. I put movies back in their boxes, turned the TV off, and put the trash can back in its corner. She watched me, a weird expression on her face, like I was performing an arcane ritual she couldn't quite understand. Maybe it was just that I'd learned most of my cleaning behaviors from Jim. It wasn't like I was sterilizing anything, but I guess I was being kind of thorough.

"You just folded a doily."

I looked down at my hands.

"Blair, are you... regularly taking all the stuff you're supposed to be taking?"

Glaring, I dropped the lacy circle onto her dresser. "I thought it was... I don't know. Something female," I said awkwardly.

Slowly, her eyes never leaving mine, Karen started to grin. "Where, exactly, did you think a female would wear something like that?"

I shook my head. "I can't believe I fed your damn cat."

  
   


* * *

  
   


Fingers brushed my cheeks, and the arms of my glasses slipped off my ears. I blinked up into a hazy face while my eyes adjusted to dim light and my mind adjusted to consciousness. My most recent memory involved leaning back on the couch to ease the ache in my shoulders; now my notebook was on the coffee table next to a copy of _Vogue_, my pen and highlighter were on the floor, and Jim was leaning over me, my glasses in his left hand, looking caught and apologetic.

"I was hoping that wouldn't wake you up," he said.

"Ellison detector," I said muzzily. I rubbed my palms over a face full of stubble, trying to connect the dots between dreams and reality. _Remake the connection by an act of will._ I rubbed harder, until the snide used-to-be-Blair shut up.

Sitting up was a dizzy, blinking adventure. Jim helped keep me from falling back over, a steadying hand on my shoulder until I said he could let go. He took a minute to straighten my shirt and yank on my hair before he pulled back; I tried to fend him off, but it only made him laugh.

"Maybe I didn't wake you up after all."

"I'm awake," I said. "Really."

"You look like you miss your teddy bear."

"Give me my glasses back, then say that again. I dare ya."

He handed them over, forgoing the danger of comment. My vision's not all that bad--I usually just need them for reading--but lately, when my eyes are tired, things get fuzzy. Getting old, I guess, but you don't share that with a partner almost ten years your senior.

"What time is it? I just fell asleep a minute ago, I swear."

"Almost five."

"Okay, three hours and a minute ago."

"Hope you got more sleep than I did."

"So do I. Sleeping on stakeout will not make you popular with Simon."

"Next time, you come keep me company."

"Nah. You snore."

"I don't snore, Sandburg. I breathe a little loud, maybe--"

"You breathe like a buzzsaw."

"I think maybe you oughta write about _your_ senses," Jim said. Then snapped his mouth shut, his eyes shifting instantly to my notebook.

I leaned back against the cushions, all the way back, stretching my throat out long. I was too tired for a fight, way too tired for an apology. And what was I gonna say? _Sorry, Jim, didn't mean to leave my life out where you could trip over it?_ Not too fucking likely.

"Chapter two." Best to get it all out there. "And half of three. Maybe a little over half."

Jim shifted up, sat down on the couch beside me. His elbows were on his knees, and I had an easy view of the long line of his back. He was still in his jacket, rain-beaded black leather, and he hadn't taken his Jags cap off. It was cold out, and he'd brought some of that in with him; I could feel it radiating out of him, waves of a late, dark night.

He didn't look at me, which I took with a kind of gratitude. There wasn't any tension in me, just a low-grade, thrumming ache. I wanted to reach out to him, but he was cold, and we were in his girlfriend's house, and in a few days I'd turn in two more chapters of my magnum opus.

"Moving pretty fast," he said.

"I want to finish by April."

He leaned over the coffee table and picked up my yellow Sanford Accent. It spun over his knuckles--right, then left, then right again. "Really fast," he said softly, and the spinning stopped, and he clutched the highlighter in white, tense fingers.

"Jim."

"Why April?"

Why April? Because I didn't think I could write fast enough to get it done in March. Because May was too far away. Because I carried the damn paper in me like a virus and finishing was the only antidote. The only way to burn it out of me, from the inside.

I said, "Because I hate the way you look at me now."

He nodded, and bent forward, and set the highlighter back on the coffee table carefully. Like it was crystal, and the slightest jarring would shatter it.

He turned to me and met my eyes, just an instant, just a single second of his eyes on mine. He looked at me with the look I hated, fragile and cornered and scared. I saw it was Jim that would shatter if he weren't careful, if I weren't careful.

But we both were.

"April it is," he said, lightly, and his eyes skated away. He didn't shatter.

I took a long, shaky breath, and let it out slowly. Jim didn't shatter.

But I felt like I had.

"You should head home." Jim let out a chuff of air and pushed himself to his feet. "Way past your bedtime."

I stood up beside him, and grabbed his arm, stopping him on his way back to the status quo. He looked at me from behind every defense he had at his disposal, Mr. Calm and Collected, the Ice Man. I squeezed until I could feel the bones of his wrist in my hand, but he didn't make a sound, didn't flinch. I could tell I was gone, back in that non-essential category, and I thought if Karen came in just then she'd see Jim standing there alone. Staring through empty air.

"Jim." My voice cracked; I cleared my throat, and slid my hand down, over his. My right hand, his left, a bizarre handshake.

"I should go check on Karen," he said.

"You're my partner."

"I thought I was your friend."

"You're my best friend, damn it." I held our clasped hands up between us. "Look at this. This is _us_."

"This is us until April."

And then he let go of my hand and walked around me, heading toward the bedroom.

I stood where he left me, and shook.

  
   


* * *

  
   


"I'm bailing."

I hadn't bothered to knock, some insane masochistic impulse pushing me through the door and into the bedroom before I made a sound. Jim was on the edge of Karen's bed, one of her hands folded into both of his. A small light on her bedside table turned both of them gold and put the rest of the room in shadow. _Golden fire people_. But this was a different brand of nightmare altogether.

They looked up when I barged in, and before their faces registered surprise I saw tenderness in both of them, and the last traces of a warm, easy smile fading from Jim's mouth. His face was as red as hers was, and he wasn't running a fever. It made me wonder what I'd caught him at, and hate myself for wondering.

Karen made a move like she thought Jim was going to let her stand. I waved her off before he had to do anything macho, and she relaxed back into her pillows. "Thanks for coming over, Blair," she said. "Sorry I was such a grouch."

I faked a smile in her direction, hands in my pockets. "Any time." I felt red in the face myself, more of an intruder now than when Karen was in here alone. They made a circle somehow and I was on the outside of it, which was how it ought to be, because Jim was in love with her and I was what I was. Participant observer--only not so much of the participant, not anymore.

_Home is where the hepafilter is_. In my head somebody was laughing, cold and bright and furious. I clenched my teeth to keep the sound inside.

Jim's eyes were on me, steady and measuring. "You good to drive home?"

"I'm awake," I said.

"You don't look too good."

"I'm fine, Doctor Ellison." It came out a little sharper than I wanted it to. "Checking out AMA, okay? I'll see you tomorrow afternoon at the station."

"We've got an interview tomorrow," Jim said to Karen. "I can come over right after...."

She shook her head, red-nosed and eyes fever-bright. "No way. I'm fine, and I'm in recovery, and I don't want anybody hovering over me. Misery doesn't really love company."

"But I want to help," Jim said. "What if you get sicker?"

"I'll see a doctor."

"What if you get so sick you can't drive to the clinic?"

"I'll call an ambulance." Her mouth twitched at the corners.

"What if they don't come in time?"

"They will," I said brightly. "They always do for me."

Both of them looked at me. Karen's smile faltered. Jim's faded out altogether.

Mine just hung there on my face like plastic. After a moment, I cleared my throat. "So, anyway, I'm bailing. Karen, thanks for the use of the couch. I'm gonna leave the mint tea here, okay? I have a stash at home."

"Thanks, Blair." After a second of silence, she poked Jim in the arm. He caught her eyes, sighed, and turned back to me.

"Thanks, Blair." Jim rolled his eyes where she couldn't see him.

Outside I picked up some of the cold on the way to my car. My fingers were numb by the time I reached it, clumsy with the keys. I unlocked the door, climbed in, and started the engine. Had to let it warm up before I trusted it on the road. So, it gave me some time to settle myself, too. It was late--or really early, however you wanted to look at it--and I was tired. Long day, long night. Longer day tomorrow, and nothing but more writing at the end of it. I leaned my head on the steering wheel, breathing slow and deep. I wasn't going to sleep, just--pausing, for a second or two, to recharge.

A tap on my window yanked me out of the trance.

Jim.

I rolled down the window, just a crack. "I wasn't sleeping," I said, before he could say a word. "I was just warming up the engine."

"Uh-huh."

"Jim, man, come on--"

He opened the door for me and stepped back. "Don't make me arrest you."

"I'm fine."

"Good. You can keep me company while I drive us home."

That was pretty much the end of the discussion. I turned the car off and climbed out, locking the door. He shut it behind me.

I walked beside him to the truck, hands dug deep in my pockets. "Thought you'd want to stay a while."

"Nah." He shrugged. "Time to go home."

"She threw you out," I said. "You guys aren't...?"

"No. I wouldn't have--geez, Sandburg." Jim scrubbed a hand over his face and looked away. "No. Not yet."

"Right, right, sorry. None of my business."

"Thank you."

"Sorry."

"You planning on getting in the truck sometime tonight?"

I didn't help him stay awake on the way home. I drifted, half aware, half asleep, sensing him and the truck but only distantly, as part of a strange inner dream logic that held me at the edge of consciousness. He didn't seem to need my help--just the street lights and the radio. He sang along to _Scarborough Fair_ on the oldies station. He had a good voice, soft, on key when he wanted to be.

He shook me a little to wake me up when we got home. Kept a hand on my shoulder all the way up in the elevator. I felt heavy, thick-headed and empty. Jim's hand was warm and firm, and I was grateful for it, anchored by it, as he steered me into the loft and into my room.

I stood at the center of my room, and knew I was supposed to be doing something.

"Get undressed," Jim suggested. "Go to sleep."

That was it.

"Okay." I yawned hugely, and stretched my arms up over my head. I shrugged out of my jacket, let it fall to the floor where I stood, and started on the buttons of my shirt.

"Hey, Sandburg."

I thought he'd gone.

"Yeah?"

"Good luck with those chapters. I know this is important to you. It's just hard. Knowing what it means. I just--"

"What, Jim?"

"Nothing." His eyes were so blue it hurt when I looked into them. "April's not so far away."

"Jim--"

"Let me know if you need anything. You know. If I can help."

I nodded slowly, never taking my eyes off him. No longer tired at all.

"Okay." He nodded once, decisively. "Go to bed." He turned and went out, shutting my doors behind him.

I did. It was a very long time before I slept.

Two days later I started sneezing.

  
   


* * *

  
   


Teaching a class is never quite what you expect it to be. Not the first time, not any time thereafter. I always dressed a little "up" on the days I was supposed to teach, which for me meant there weren't any holes in anything I was wearing. Since I started hanging with Jim, I was maybe a little more uptown than I used to be; not so much settling down as blending in. I picked a look halfway between Jim and Henry Brown, and stuck with it--the anthropologist abroad. When in Rome, and all that.

Teaching a class when you're dying of the flu doesn't do much for your style quotient, no matter how well you're dressed. The sympathy factor, however, is a deal-maker.

Doctor Flanagan drove me over to Sanderson Hall and dropped me off right in front of the building. My head was congested and my chest ached and I barely had the energy to move. He took pity on me, which proved he had a heart. I felt a little guilty when he made the offer, but not guilty enough to start paying for my own coffee. The guy had tenure; it wasn't like he couldn't afford it. I passed two of my students leaving the building as I walked in, grabbed both of them by their backpack-straps and ushered them into the classroom ahead of me.

"Only five minutes?" I said, shaking my head in dismay. "I've got a master's degree. I get ten." I gave everyone about twenty seconds to get themselves ready for the fruits of my knowledge, then threw myself into the lecture head-first.

I ended up teaching bare-armed and still I was sweating, and shivering at the same time. The overhead wouldn't focus, which meant Sarah--front-row Sarah with the inch-thick mascara and eyes that never left my chest--had to have everything repeated.

Twice.

Slow.

It was painfully obvious half the class hadn't bothered with the readings I'd assigned on Friday, and by the time we were thirty minutes in to the hour and fifteen minute class, I was ready to bail. Lucky for me, I came prepared.

"Okay, books off your desks. You can use your notes, those of you who actually have some. One sheet of paper with your name at the top, and don't give me that look, I warned you guys last week." A groan went up like they'd rehearsed it; I showed no mercy, and handed out the questions.

They were silently scratching out pathetic answers I'd be expected to grade that night when the door at the back of the room opened quietly. Jim's face peered in, and when he caught sight of me, he waved.

I climbed the steps to meet him and pulled him back into the hallway. "Hi," I said, pitching my voice low. "Are you registered for this class?"

Jim grinned. "I think 101 is a little below my level, teach."

"So do they." I glared down into the classroom. "Eyes front, Sarah," I called, and mascara-girl's head spun back to her desk like Linda Blair's. "Trust me, Toby's not doing any better than you are."

"Tough guy," Jim said. "I like that."

"So what brings you to my hallowed halls? Let me guess. You found the Davis shooter, broke him in the box, and you need my expert report-writing skills to record the outcome of your brilliant interrogation."

"Nope."

I waited. Jim just kept grinning.

I sighed. "Tell me."

"I've got a five-hundred-year-old mother-in-law down on Market who swears her daughter's husband is funneling cash out of the family account to fund an alien invasion."

I whistled. "Man. And I thought your family was warped."

"This time she says he's stolen her daughter's car for them. A '96 Honda Civic, I think. Metallic Seafoam Green. You up for it?"

I looked down on the fifty bent heads below. There were only three questions on the quiz, and they only needed to write a paragraph for each. Assuming they had even a passing familiarity with the material, most of them should be done within five minutes.

And Jim hadn't pulled me out on a call for weeks. I missed that. I wanted to _go_.

Jim caught my look. "Hey, if you need time...."

"Nah. They'll be done in five. You parked out front?"

"I'm parked at Hargrove."

"Bummer." I shook my head; at least it was downhill from here. "Five minutes, guys," I said. "And then, since most of you need the time to study, I'm gonna cut you loose a few minutes early. Just stack the papers on the table behind the podium, and try not to trample the weak and slow on your way out the door." The end of my speech was all but inaudible over the squeak of fifty chairs shoving back from desks and the sudden storm of zipper-sounds from below. "And don't forget your bluebooks when you come for the exam, 'cause I'm not buying extra this time."

"What are you, Sandburg, some kinda hardass?" Jim shook his head. "You sound like my last drill sergeant."

"I'm a pushover. You should hear Doctor Roberts." I stepped back just in time to let a river of student body flow between us. Several students stopped to ask me what the assignment was, and whether I had any extra copies of the syllabus. I directed them, with no small amount of glee, to the envelope hanging on my door in Hargrove Hall. If I had to walk it, so did they.

"You sure you're up for this?" Jim said. "You don't look so great."

"Nah, I'm fine."

"You got a fever, Sandburg?"

"I'm _fine_. I'm not sick, I'm just flushed with the passion of intellectual pursuits. I'm a scholar, man."

"You were a better-looking one yesterday."

"Gee, thanks, Jim. Now I feel like a scuzz."

"No charge."

We were halfway there, a few students trailing us and pulling me back for occasional questions, when Jim's cell phone rang. It was Karen.

I slowed down a little. It wasn't a bad day. It wasn't raining, which I always count as a good thing, and the promised warm front had manifested itself on cue. Between enjoying the weather and harassing my students, I managed to avoid overhearing the actual words of Jim's conversation.

Unfortunately, I couldn't miss the tone. Sweet and sexy. Something happened then, something I couldn't even put into words and something I was extremely not proud of, but there it was. I knew that voice. I missed that voice.

I caught up.

"Hey," I said, smiling. "That Karen? Let me talk to her."

Jim batted my hand away. "Back off, Sandburg. Go talk to your own girlfriend."

"Can't. Alexandria's on hiatus."

"Don't you mean sabbatical?"

"No, I mean hiatus. It means I fucked up and now I have to pay. It's very nineties, man, you have no hope of understanding. Come on, I need to talk to Karen, hand it over, Ellison--thank you." I snatched the phone away. "Hey, Karen!"

"Hi, Blair. I thought you had class right now."

"Well, you know, the mighty Ellison summons me and I appear. Listen, could you do me a favor? Do you think you could make this guy go to bed at a decent hour tonight? Because I'm standing here right next to him and he's all pale and wan and I'm not sure, but I think he's lost his reflection. I have it on excellent authority he was on stakeout until three this morning and up again at five-thirty."

"No way. You're his keeper, not me. And he promised to take me to watch some co-eds get the cuisinart treatment tonight."

"You guys are going to the Save the Humans rally?"

"Ha ha. We're going to see _The Blair Witch Project_."

I stopped walking. Jim and several students strolled right past me. "You can't."

"Sure we can. They're still running it at that artsy place over on Halifax. It's supposed to be wild."

"No, I mean, _he_ can't. Hang on." I hit the mute button and jogged a few feet to catch up with Jim.

"Hey." I grabbed his arm, stopping him. "Look, Jim, you can't go see that movie. It'll make you puke your guts out."

Jim rolled his eyes, and took the phone back. "I've seen worse."

"I'm not talking about the gore. I'm talking about the camera work. I've seen it, Jim, and it's going to make you totally sick. It's like two hours on the Tilt-a-Whirl. I'm telling you, you can't handle it. Go see _The Sixth Sense_ or something, people actually bleed in that one and it's got a bitchin' twist at the end."

"Since when do you decide what I can and can't handle?"

My mouth fell open, and I stared at him for a minute before I recovered the power of speech. "Since when do _you_?"

Jim hit the mute button and put the phone to his ear. "Sorry, Karen. Sandburg's biological clock appears to be ticking." He laughed. "Yeah. I'm thinking of getting him a puppy. How about I pick you up for seven-thirty? That'll get us there in plenty of time to sit around and make fun of the previews." He listened for a few seconds, looked over at me, and laughed again. "Yeah, I'll tell him. Don't worry." Jim turned away, and his voice dropped. "Miss you too. See you soon."

He closed the phone, slid it back in his pocket. "Look, Sandburg--"

That was all I stuck around to hear.

  
   


* * *

  
   


I beat him to the truck, mainly because I was running and he wasn't. I let myself in on the passenger's side and waited. Adrenaline was running all through me, and it felt like every nerve in my body was flooded with electricity. I needed the time alone to get myself under control, to get a grip, to get my congested lungs working again. It was either take a break or hit a wall, and I couldn't afford to crack up my hand.

He came across the quad slowly, curving around between Hargrove and the fountain. I watched him from someplace distant in my head. He walked with purpose, tall and straight, never wavering in his course, and I knew that I was going to need both his certainty and my detachment. Jim and I only fit together in the interstitial spaces of our lives; it was a weird shade of monogamy but we did it, and we didn't talk about it, just another unspoken rule hanging out in the silence between us.

He'd just blown me off, and he'd done it for her.

That meant things were serious. Jim was in deep enough now that he had to leave me behind, and it had happened before, hell, I'd left him behind a few times, but this was different.

And I couldn't breathe again, I was having a really significant problem with my lungs, and this ending hurt like it hadn't hurt those other times. It cut deep.

The grass was shadowed, but the angle of the sun turned the fountain into a shower of bright sparks. He was behind it and then in front, watching me across the space between us, through the windshield. There was a memory in the image, sinking fast into cold water, a dark place with Jim on the other side. I watched him, breathing hard and raspy, searching my head for a reason not to be scared.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that. It was out of line--" He said it as soon as he got into the truck, with his hands tight and white-knuckled on the steering wheel. His face was pale and hard, white at the corners of his mouth. He wouldn't look at me. He was scared, too, which scared me even more, because I could handle me being pissed and scared just fine, but Jim being pissed and scared turned the world on its side in a way I distinctly did not like. I took a breath that made my chest hurt, made my head spin just a little, and reached out to him.

"Jim, come on. Don't--it's okay." I pulled one of his hands off the steering wheel and held it in mine to warm it up. He looked at me then, at our hands and then back up at me and I hated that we were in a parking lot miles from home, that I couldn't just lean on him and hold him up and make him smile. "It's okay."

"Yeah."

"You were right. Gotta cut the cord sometime, man. You have to live your life. I didn't mean to make you feel like a freak."

"You didn't."

"Yeah, I did." Me and the paper, me and his dad, all in the same box now. I didn't say it because I didn't want to remind him I was writing, but it was there in his eyes anyway, under the surface. I hated myself for putting that look there, but I didn't know how to take it back.

"Sandburg--"

"Look, I know I can come on too strong sometimes, and in the grand scheme of things why should it matter if you puke your guts out at the movies? It's your God-given right, Jim, and it's not gonna kill you, so I should've stayed out of it."

"Gee, thanks."

"No, I just mean--"

"I know what you mean."

"Do you?"

"I'm not a moron, Sandburg."

"Right."

"Damn right." His hand tightened around my fingers and I squeezed back, then let go. We just grinned at each other, and I felt good, really good, like I'd just sailed out of a storm into fair weather.

"But you're still going to the movie." I looked out of the window to hide a grin.

"The lady wants to go."

"You are a moron."

He laughed, and started the truck. "Look at it as a test."

"Yeah. If you survive the night, next week we'll try you on a roller coaster."

  
   


* * *

  
   


The plan was to not wait up for him. The plan was, in fact, to completely ignore the fact that Jim was off somewhere being an idiot with his girlfriend. The plan was to write, because of all the things I was juggling lately, writing was the one thing I had to keep up in the air. With the semester ending, I had three weeks of peace and quiet ahead of me before January started the cycle over again.

I meant to use them all.

I set up the living room for the effort, telling myself home was better than the library, because friends could find me at the library and interrupt my intricate mental processes.

I waited up. I mean, who am I kidding, anyway?

The key rattled in the door at eleven-thirty, and Jim staggered in looking like the ghost of Jacob Marley, only Marley had chains and a marginally healthier complexion.

"Not one fucking word, Sandburg," he said. "Not one."

He made it to the bathroom. I had kind of a halfway guilty urge to follow him, make sure he was okay, but it wasn't like he needed me to hold his hair back. Guy was almost forty, he was an ex-Ranger, and for years he'd eaten his own cooking. He didn't need a spotter to puke his guts out.

Still. Normal people don't sound like that when they vomit, not unless they're possessed by the devil. I was getting a little unsteady myself, just listening to it.

"Jim?"

I went to the door, looked in. Jim was on the floor by the john, eyes closed, his face about three times more Caucasian than the last time I'd seen it.

"Whoa."

"Shut up," he said. "Get me a towel."

"You look like shit."

"Just get me a towel, Sandburg."

"Sat through the whole thing, huh?"

He opened his eyes. "You like breathing?"

I wet down a wash cloth at the sink, squeezed the water out and tossed it over. He caught it easily and wiped his eyes with it, then his mouth. I leaned back against the counter and watched him, trying not to feel smug. Failing miserably.

"So." I folded my arms across my chest, and tilted my head for a better look at him. "How'd you like the end? That part where they were running around and around and around and--"

Jim's stomach made a sound I'd never heard before, and he lurched back over the toilet. I watched for a second, then ran water into a plastic cup for him and set it just within reach.

"You okay, Jim?" I said after a minute. "Can I get you anything?"

He answered, but I didn't catch any of the words. The tone, though, that was pretty enlightening.

When I left the bathroom, I was grinning. Sometimes I hate my job.

And sometimes, I don't.

  
   


* * *

  
   


When you're a child, being sick has certain inescapable advantages. You can't go out and hang with your friends, sure, but on the plus side you don't have to go to school, you get to read all day, and your mom brings you every meal in bed. Growing up, I was not what you'd call a child of many friends, so the hanging out part wasn't that much of a loss.

As an adult, the advantages of being sick are non-existent. The worst possible thing to do on a sick day is actually be sick. Two days from exposure to onset; it only took one more to put me flat on my back. There was no reading, there was no pampering, and there sure as hell wasn't gonna be any writing.

The day before, I'd turned in chapter two ahead of schedule. I hadn't asked for Jim's help; I didn't need it. I knew Jim's senses better than I knew my own, and in the absence of actual data I also knew exactly how to fake it. With a box of tissues in one hand and my life in the other, I'd stopped in at Sydney's office. I dropped off the chapter and a note explaining that I'd be back on Friday, maybe. If I lived.

In the absence of any of the things necessary to make a sick day bearable, I shuffled my aching bod from bed to fridge to bed again, propped myself against the wall, and self-medicated with self-pity and pineapple-orange juice.

Sometime around three, it occurred to me that I actually was probably dying. By five, I was convinced that this was not a bad thing.

Jim knocked on my door around six. It was his third try since he'd come home, and I was weakening. If I'd had any energy at all not expressly reserved for breathing, I would've explained to him just how much I hated the world and everything in it--most specifically those things closest to me, and most deeply those close things that made soft, tentative noises at my door. I couldn't even muster up the life-force to tell him to get lost.

Instead, I lay in my bed like a slug, the covers kicked off, sweat chilling on my body in a thin layer that felt a lot like grease. I felt swollen all over. Blair Sandburg, Jewish sausage.

I wanted to turn off the ceiling fan, but the switch was over by my door and might as well be in Cambodia for all the possibility of me going there. I wanted to pull the blankets up over me, but the blankets were at the foot of the bed. I did manage to turn my head when the door opened, a bad move that started a slow, painful headache that throbbed all the way down to my toenails. Hair slipped down my face and over my eyes like a wash of wavy brown interference as the Doctor Ellison show rolled through its opening credits.

"Can I please," he said, eyes pleading, "if I promise not to bug you at all for the rest of the night, can I please just get you some Nyquil or something? Some juice?"

"I'm fine," I wheezed at him. "Everything's... under control."

"This is my fault." He glared, daring me to deny it. "I shouldn't have made you take care of Karen."

"Don't feel guilty," I begged him. "It makes me tired-er."

"I don't feel guilty." Straight-faced he lied to me; the man has no shame.

"Good. 'Cause I'm not sick."

"I know."

"I had a shot."

"You said."

"I'm just a little tired."

"You work too much." Jim brought his hands out from behind his back and offered me a box. "Tissue?"

I flopped an arm in his direction. He took it as an invitation, and sat down on the edge of my bed. My breath hitched as the bed moved, a combination of respiratory distress and the strain of keeping a major whine locked inside. I was glad to have him there, pitifully glad, and I wanted nothing so much as I wanted to grab him and hold on until I either felt a little better or died.

His hand brushed over my forehead, pushing my hair back. "Christ, Sandburg," he said. "You're really hot."

"You should... see me healthy."

He rolled his eyes at the ceiling, and handed over the box of tissues.

"Thank you. Go away now. Please? I don't... want you to see me die in pain."

"Where do you hurt?"

There was a copy of Gray's Anatomy on my desk. I pointed at it, my eyes falling halfway shut. "There."

"There's stuff in that book you don't even _have_, Doc."

"Hurts anyway."

And there was the whine I couldn't stop. Never handled being sick very well, and the presence of kindness in the face of my misery dissolved every microliter of stoicism in my body--which never actually contained that much to start with.

Jim nodded. His eyes were soft with sympathy, his expression deeply concerned. I hated him with a vast, epic viciousness matched only by my sudden, pathetic gratitude. I pulled a tissue out of the box and applied it to my nose.

Not--quite--quickly enough.

"Ick." Jim reached for a tissue for himself.

"Sorry. Greater love hath no man." I wiped my nose carefully with one tissue, then blotted at Jim's sleeve with a fresh one. "You have a place in heaven, my friend."

"Yeah," he said. "Baptism by snot."

"You're a good friend."

"I'm a pushover." Jim gathered up our used tissues and dumped them into the trashcan next to the bed. "Got me wrapped around your little finger."

I lifted one hand, waggling my fingers at him. "Nope. See?"

"I think the fever's affecting your brain."

"Something is." I grinned even wider, and dropped my hand on his. Touching him felt good, and I couldn't remember why I hadn't done it sooner. "Jim."

He smiled, wide and unreserved. "Definitely off the tracks, Sandburg."

"Did I ever tell you, you're my best friend?"

My heart felt so full of him, I didn't think I could survive it, and my head was pounding in the same driving rhythm as my blood. I licked at my lips, just drinking in the sight of him. He blazed in the lamplight, like he had at Karen's, but he was looking at me this time, just at me. I couldn't keep all that feeling in me and it just kind of streamed out of my mouth in a torrent of unrestrained schmaltz. I couldn't shut myself up.

Jim leaned close. "You probably smell really good," I said softly.

He laughed. "Better than you."

"I never like to hurt you, Jim." I said it in a rush, while the fever was high enough to provide some courage. "I never mean to, you know? It's like we just go at cross-purposes all the time, and I don't know how to make it stop."

His hand tensed under mine, a quick, tight spasm. "Shh. I'm going to get you some aspirin."

I shook my head. "Not yet."

"Yes, yet. Come on, Blair, you need to take something."

"I'm not delirious."

"I'm not saying you are."

"I love you, I just want you to know that. You're really important, Jim, I mean it. All this time I've been... following you around, being your partner, your friend, helping you with this sentinel thing, I just do it because of how special you are, you know? I don't know if anybody else gets it, and I like... being the guy who does."

Jim pulled back, disentangling his hand. The smile on his face grew thin and started to fade. A hot, tight knot tied itself in my gut, heavy with confusion and disgust. Shooting off my mouth when I was sick--emotional Russian Roulette. Definitely out of his comfort zone, definitely way out of mine. I was about to open my mouth to take it back when he fit the Good Humor mask back on.

"Yeah." He was trying, but even high on my own immune system I could hear the bitterness. "I'm a real special case."

"You are." I struggled to sit up, but he pushed me back, no effort at all, just a hand on my chest and a breath of pressure. Weak as I was, he could've blown on me and achieved the same effect. "Can't describe it, can't defend it, just... had to say it. One of a kind, Jim...."

"Save it for the paper."

The smile was totally gone now; I wanted to make it come back but my energy was gone too, ebbed away like a low tide. I clutched at his arm, tried to hold him there long enough to unsay the mush. But I didn't know how to do it, and I knew I wouldn't mean it, and he was already pulling away. Gentle but unstoppable, out of my reach so fast it scared me.

"Jim?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't feel bad, okay? It's okay."

"I feel fine."

"Where've I... heard that one, before?"

He stood up, looking down at me with bright, bright eyes. "Jesus, Blair. What does it take?"

I watched him, and tried to make sense of it, but I hurt everywhere and any kind of meaning I might have dug out of the question got lost in that, swallowed up. I couldn't make the words fit together.

After a few seconds, he pulled my blankets up and over me, smoothing them over my chest. "Sleep. I'm going to run down to the pharmacy, be gone just a few minutes." He pushed some papers on my desk aside and dug my cell phone out of the clutter. He set it on my bedside table, on top of a spiral-bound notebook. "Call me if you start to feel worse."

"I'm not sick," I said, curling in on myself on one side. I watched him walk to the door, my eyes heavier than ever, fading fast.

"I know." A whisper, so soft I could barely hear him. "If you feel worse, call me anyway."

**III.**

Home had been like boot camp for the dying since my three-day bout with the Martian Death Flu. I had a vague memory of Christmas in the form of a bare tree in the living room and an overseas call from my mom, but mostly the holiday went uncelebrated. Jim was the kind of drill sergeant that made you pray for a quick fever spike and a nice, quiet coma.

After two weeks' recovery in the Gung Ho House of Healing, I was so well-trained Naomi would've gagged to see it. I'd started to have disturbing fantasies involving thermometers and Grandma Ellison's Chicken Noodle Soup, and my unprocessed negative feelings about vitamin C were gonna cost me in therapy.

Jim and I fell into a holding pattern. January was a don't-ask, don't-tell kind of time for us. I didn't talk about writing and I sure as hell didn't do any of it in front of him; in return, he didn't hassle me about the paper and tried not to do any sentinel stuff he thought I might want recorded for posterity.

The fast-fade was easy, so easy I didn't even know I was doing it. It took Simon button-holing me on one of my Major Crime fly-bys to bring me down from the top of the Ivory Tower.

"Are you aware," he said, giving me the evil eye all up and down, "that your _partner_ has been trying to reach you all day?"

I switched seamlessly from searching Jim's desk frantically for a pen to searching my backpack frantically for my cell phone. Which, predictably, wasn't there. I'm not sure why I even bothered to look; I could see it like I was clairvoyant, picture every sleek little line of it as it sat innocently on my desk next to the office phone.

"Uh," I said intelligently, not meeting Simon's eyes.

"Something about a meeting you missed. A follow-up interview. Of a witness." He paused. "A witness to an auto theft?"

"Oh, shit."

"Yes."

"The Gregory thing."

"The Gregory thing," he confirmed. "I'm sure you have an excellent excuse for your absence."

I sank down into Jim's chair, and let my head fall into my hands. "Would you settle for entertaining?" I asked the desktop. "Entertaining I can do."

"I'm not the one who's mad at you, Sandburg," he said. There was as much sympathy in his eyes when I looked up at him as there is air in outer space. Less.

I counted to ten, then said, "If you were paying me, I'd resign."

"If I were paying you, I'd have stopped by now."

"Oh, come on, Simon." I slammed my palms down on the desk. "It's not like I skipped out to go to the arcade or something. I'm in the process of getting a degree, and I know this is going to sound a little crazy, but occasionally the Anthro department likes me to put in an actual physical appearance in one of the classes they pay me to teach. I've never quite managed to convince them my presence here helps keep the streets safe for Joe Public. They generally tend to think of me as _one_ of Joe Public, what with me not getting a badge or a gun or a paycheck from the city or anything even remotely like compensation or recognition for the work I do here. Funny how academics can be so irrational, huh?"

Simon just looked at me. He looked at me for a long time while I breathed hard and counted to ten over and over again. His eyes held steady on me and it was like he had heat vision or something; I started to turn red. The blush started at the tips of my ears and worked its way forward; I could feel it as a bright, humiliating warmth spreading over my skin.

"Feel better now?" he said when it was clear I'd run out of words. There was a minor chord of concern in his voice; minor, but unmistakable.

"Yeah," I said, holding his look and daring him to say anything else. "So?"

"So Jim's still looking for you. He's down in Forensics with Serena, checking on the Wilson reports."

"Okay," I said. His eyebrows went up; I sighed, pushed up from the chair, and adjusted my backpack. "_Okay_. I'm going. This is me going. All right?"

"Fine," he said. He turned and started toward his office, his shoulders stiff--probably with all the stuff he could've said to me, but didn't.

"Simon...."

He turned around, waiting.

"Sorry, sir," I said, looking down at the floor.

"Go see Jim," he said. "Then go home and get some sleep. You need it."

I nodded. Simon went into his office and shut the door. Taking a deep breath, I pushed out of the doors to Major Crimes and headed for the elevator.

Forensics I could do. Sleep....

That was another story altogether.

  
   


* * *

  
   


Serenaville was immaculate, glass and steel and white. It was definitely her domain, and you just didn't bring dirt into it, not if you wanted to live. Her eyes flicked up from her computer screen when I walked in, scanned me, made me glad I'd showered; she lost interest, and the computer sucked her back in.

Jim was reading her screen from about fifteen feet away, scoping out reflected letters on the surface of a glass-faced cabinet. He gave a little wave when I came in, then held a finger to his lips. I made a covert hand sign that meant _what the hell's going on?_ and he made one back that meant _shut up, Sandburg, I'm trying to read_. At least, that's what I had to assume; I stayed quiet and planted myself on a black vinyl stool, one so high my feet didn't touch the floor. I pulled my backpack around my body without taking it off my shoulder, and fished out the notebook I'd started on Monday.

Jim saw me do it, and turned away from the reflection in the cabinet.

"What?" I said quietly, flicking my eyes at Serena. She was all wrapped up in an on-screen report, oblivious.

"I sneezed three times this morning after breakfast," he said. "Thought you might want to write that down."

"Jesus, Jim. These are my lecture notes, okay?" I shoved the notebook at him, but he wouldn't take it; I let go, and we both watched it fall. It lay there between us like a black stain on the white tile.

"This time," Jim said. His eyes skated away from mine, and his voice was softer. He let out a chuff of air, shaking his head. "Sorry."

"Pick it up," I said.

"What?"

"Pick it up. What, you're afraid to touch it? I'm not afraid for you to have it. Flip through it, Jim. Read every page, okay? Because I'd really hate for you to have to trust me, I'd hate for you to have to take me on faith. Jesus, Jim, what do I have to say to you to prove I'm not going to fuck you over with this? I'm your friend, man. I wish you could hang onto that."

A small cough from Serena's workstation let me know I had her attention now, if not Jim's. He didn't move, so I stood up. I leaned down and scooped up the spiral-bound notebook. The thing was, there were notes about him in there, little things I'd jotted down between classes, but it wasn't the kind of thing he was thinking of. It was just statistics, and my pathetic attempts to bend statistics to fit a kind of pathetic theory. He wouldn't have understood them even if he'd seen them. I certainly didn't have anything personal in it; once burned, twice shy, and Naomi Sandburg hadn't raised any stupid children that I knew of.

I went over to stand behind Serena, leaning in close enough to smell her perfume. I had no idea what it was called, but it was a kind of pink fragrance, light and floral. I liked it a lot better than whatever Megan wore, which Jim had once described as a cross between Foster's and Aqua Velva. Serena leaned back when I leaned in, and I put a hand on her shoulder, smiling down at her. She smiled back.

Jim didn't have a smile for either of us. "What've you got?" he said, snapping the words out like gunfire.

"Enough to know he's a non-secretor," Serena said. "Enough to know he's probably about five-nine, about one-seventy--about Blair's size, actually, maybe just a little bit bigger. We didn't get any hairs, but there were a few fibers that might take us somewhere." She shrugged, and turned back to her monitor. "Prints you found belonged to the maid's son, which we kind of figured since they were so small."

"The ex-husband?"

"Six-two, two-twenty. Not a match."

"But is he a secretor?"

"Captain Banks felt we needed more to go on before we asked for tests."

Jim nodded, expressionless. Simon had a fine line to walk, and it didn't always endear him to his men. The file open on the screen belonged to Martha Wilson, a young mother of two who'd been found dead in her home three months ago today. She'd been shot once through the back of the head, apparently while kneeling; nothing in her home had been disturbed, and there were no signs of other physical assault. She was a contract programmer, a telecommuter working out of a third bedroom that had converted nicely into an office. Serena's examination of Martha's computer and network accounts had revealed no apparent motive for her murder.

Martha's ex-husband was career military, a sharp guy with the brains to keep his mouth shut when Jim had him in the box. He'd lawyered up, and it seemed to be one of those rare times when the system worked to protect the innocent. Brian Wilson didn't look like our guy, and now there was a second shooting, a little messier this time but similar enough to give Major Crime the collective shakes. The new girl was raped before she was shot, which could mean a different guy or escalation, and neither of those prospects made us very happy. Two crazy gunmen in the city in the course of one long, gray winter--or just one guy, starting off crazy, getting a little crazier every day.

I knew Wilson wasn't that guy. He didn't fit the profile, and I didn't get that buzz off him, that instinctive electric charge you grow into when you've been at this long enough. He was clean--but there was still this look on Jim's face. He really wanted to know if Wilson was a secretor.

"His alibi checked out, Jim," I said, and he snapped his head up, glaring like I'd poked him.

"I know that," he said. "I just--"

"--want to know." I grinned at him, just because I knew him so well--better than he thought I did anyway, well enough to figure him out. He didn't think Wilson was guilty, but he had to cover all of his bases--not for procedure or paperwork, but for _Jim_. "You know the first one wasn't the right kind of kill."

"Probably not."

"Not enough passion in it. Lovers kill face to face, don't they? I read somewhere they bring the same passion to the murder that they brought to the bedroom."

"Then maybe it's exactly the right kind of kill."

Jim's eyes didn't change. I didn't have any answers for that on-hand--I just looked at him, wondering where his mind was, pretty sure I didn't want to go there.

Serena snapped us out of it. "Are you guys done? I've got a meeting in ten minutes."

"All done," Jim said. He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me at the door, aiming a thin smile over his shoulders. "Thanks for the input, Serena. Give me a buzz if you get anything else, okay?"

We were gone before she could answer.

  
   


* * *

  
   


Jim was a moving wall of silence beside me as we walked the halls toward the elevator. People smiled at me, said hello, and nodded at Jim as we passed. They were less likely to speak to Jim, but you could see they liked him. He didn't speak either, but he always nodded back, and sometimes he even worked up a smile.

We waited a quiet minute for the elevator, making a small island between us as people veered around to either side. A quiet ping ushered us in; five seconds later, Jim hit the stop button.

I turned to face him. His face was so pale it looked cold under the fluorescent lights, cold as winter above the ice-blue button-down. It was a good color for his eyes, but it made him look remote.

His eyes said different.

"I'm sorry," he said, forcing the apology out fast. "I had no call jumping on you like that."

I nodded, and tried to find something safe to look at. The wall behind him, the doors, my hands--anything but Jim Ellison. "It's okay."

"It's not."

"It has to be."

Jim shook his head. "It doesn't."

I forced my eyes up and grabbed onto his arm. Muscles tensed up beneath my fingers, but I didn't let go. "Jim, listen. It's not a problem, okay? I know you're feeling all wonky inside over me writing this thing, but you gotta know somewhere behind all those defense mechanisms that I'm not about to screw you over. You know that, don't you?"

He nodded. Slowly, after a long pause, but it was the answer I needed.

"Just like you know that, I know you trust me. I have to know that, or none of this makes any sense."

"Just like I know that?"

I grinned, and just as slow as that nod, he grinned back. "Maybe I know it a little more toward the front of my head than you do," I said.

He nodded, and let the elevator go. We both faced front, like you're supposed to do in moving elevators, and the cables hauled us upward.

When the panel above the buttons read five, Jim reached up and put a hand on my back, just under my hair. Through my jacket, the touch was pressure without heat. It made me stop breathing for a second, just a second. His fingers scratched over the smooth leather, eased up, and wrapped around my shoulder.

I made myself take a breath. It took an act of will. I didn't want to move, didn't want him backing away. I took that breath and looked up, and he was looking down, and something about the creases at the corners of his eyes, something about the way he was smiling--he looked like he felt good, or at least better--no, good, that was the right impression. Something about that look made me want his mouth, and when he saw me wanting it, the look changed. If the elevator doors hadn't peeled open I would've had what I wanted and more.

His fingers edged higher, over the collar of my jacket, cold and rough on my skin. Another second of pressure, and he looked away from me, pushed me out ahead of him into walking traffic.

We pushed through the hall and into the bullpen, over to his desk. He shed his jacket and reached for mine, hung them both up. We sat side by side, him searching the desk for files, me uncapping a pen and slipping on my glasses. The quiet was of better quality this time, a good feeling in it--there was still something there, and I still wanted it, and it was still mine.

I grinned down at my notebook, and Jim shoved into my shoulder with his.

"What?" I eyed him over the rims of my glasses.

"'Wonky inside'?"

"Shut up."

"That some kinda technical term...?"

"Look, Ellison...."

"I was just _asking_."

  
   


* * *

  
   


He forgave me on the Gregory thing. On the way home, I got a run-down of his two interviews with the mother-in-law that had me clutching my gut, laughing so hard my eyes watered. Mrs. Ardelia Gregory turned out to be nearly ninety years old, and had reported the same car stolen five times in the past year--each time while her daughter was taking an afternoon nap, and each time while her daughter's husband was in possession of the "stolen" vehicle in question. She claimed he was planning to sell it to help the aliens. It would've been an ingenious plan if not for the fact that it was his own car, that he'd never sold it, and that as far as we knew, there weren't any aliens in Cascade.

Mrs. Ardelia Gregory was just not all that fond of her son-in-law.

I settled back against the seat when the story was over and we'd laughed ourselves into a panting, comfortable silence. It was warm in the truck, the heater blasting away and probably making the funny noise I couldn't hear. Outside, the day was just edging into evening, and the sunlight had a wavery, distant quality to it; I shivered in spite of my comfort, just at the thought of how cold it was out there. My jacket was more cool than it was warm, more a wind-block than anything else. Even layered underneath in a t-shirt and flannel, I couldn't totally avoid the damp cut of the winter wind in Cascade.

But it was warm in the truck, and not just from the heater.

I turned from the window and faced front. I was having trouble. I thought about the paper, and about Karen, about everything between us that should've stopped this before now, should have made it less inevitable.

Jim's fingers drummed on the steering wheel, keeping time with something I couldn't hear, or nothing. I didn't want to look at him, but I turned anyway, further, my eyes taking the long way up his leather-covered arms, over his shoulders. Maybe it was a little too warm, because when I got to his face, I wasn't breathing. His eyes were on the road, totally wrapped up in his driving; his lips moved, shaping silent words, closing when he didn't know the lyrics. Music from somewhere, then, maybe one of the other cars pacing us down the freeway.

No anger there now, no complications; just Jim and me on the road, on the way home. Nothing between us but empty space and air. Jim sang quietly to himself, fingers tapping the wheel, oblivious, while that space between us turned solid and unbreathable. He was so simple from here, so clear and close.

I tried to swallow. Couldn't. Forced my eyes away.

That was when he looked at me. He didn't say a word, but he took the next exit. It wasn't ours.

In a quiet of another kind he drove us through surface streets neither of us noticed. It was his city, and he knew it better than anybody. By the time he stopped the truck, in the center of an empty parking lot facing out into an empty field, I had no idea where we were.

I didn't much care where we were.

Jim reached for the ignition key and shut the engine down; I watched him do it in a strange mental space, not knowing what was going to happen in one way, knowing exactly what was coming in another. Cold seeped in through the glass without the steady output of the heater. We weren't supposed to do this anymore.

The first touch was his fingers sliding over my cheekbone. Easy and gentle, like the look in his eyes while he drove; warm, like I was, warmer than we had any right to be. I turned into the touch and looked at him and neither of us waited any longer, neither of us could.

He moved from behind the wheel, and I met him halfway. His arms went around my waist and mine around his shoulders and it wasn't what I thought it would be, wasn't crazy or strong like it was in the dark of Jim's bedroom when the silence got the best of us, some nights.

It was just Jim, and just me, just holding on. He pressed his face into my hair, and his breath on my neck wasn't devastating; it was just warm and good. It was just enough. I shifted, moved closer, and wrapped myself around him like a blanket. This was okay, it wasn't too much. It had to be okay because it felt too good to be anything else.

Everything that hurt went away.

"Blair."

I pressed in tighter, closing off all the awkward angles between us. Didn't answer; bit down so hard on my lip I tasted blood, but didn't answer.

"You feel so good," he said. "So good."

I made a small, quieting sound, and reached up with one hand to stroke over the fine brush of hair at the base of his skull. He felt good, too.

A noise slipped out of him, long and low and helpless. It shredded me; it set me up to burn. He moved. Burrowed into my hair, through it; his tongue touched warm and wet on my skin and his teeth scraped, and I flashed from warmth to heat that fast, that sudden, my fists knotting in the back of his jacket as my hips shifted, found something solid to touch.

I needed his mouth, I'd wanted it since the elevator but now I needed it, and he gave it to me, just like I knew he would. Nothing that hurt between us made any difference to this. His hands were warm, but his tongue was hot, liquid, and I broke, said things I shouldn't have. Whispered things I wasn't supposed to say. It was just that it didn't matter now, the words and the silence hurt in perfect proportion so it didn't matter which we chose. I still wanted quiet out of habit, superstitious fear--but I wanted his voice, too. I wanted to hear him.

We weren't supposed to say anything at all.

"Please," was the first thing, that was okay, but then I said his name and it was like I couldn't stop saying it, kissing him and saying his name at the same time, messy and not very effective. He was talking too, then, I didn't understand a word of it but it tasted good, his breath on my face and in my mouth. I held him as close as I could, soaking him in, twisted up in the middle of the front seat and still trying to find more of him to touch.

"Easy," he said, "easy, Blair, come on..." and that wasn't what he wanted, if he'd wanted that his hand wouldn't have moved between us, over the front of my jeans, down. The fabric was thick and I couldn't feel heat at first, just pressure, but the pressure was what I wanted, needed by then.

I answered it without thinking, finding him, pressing back and down and I was over him then, on his leg. That was better because his hands were free and he ran them down my sides and over my ass and pulled me up.

There wasn't enough room. He was over six feet tall and I wasn't a whole lot shorter and the truck was never built for this but God, it was good. I was flying, twisting down onto him, hands on his neck and his face, tongue on every part of him I could reach. And it wasn't like before, because it was daylight, that watery yellow slanting daylight as the afternoon got old and started to die, and I had my eyes open. I could see him. His eyes had that look from the elevator, so free and welcoming, so wide and gentle. Jim Ellison, I reminded myself, Jim Ellison underneath me in the front seat of his truck, knowing who he was and who I was and not fighting it, fighting _for_ it, pressing up into me anyway.

I could see him. Daylight in an empty parking lot, looking out on an empty field. I couldn't catch my breath.

And I couldn't keep my eyes open when I came because it wasn't right, it wasn't right this way, with Karen's face in my mind, and the paper in his. With nothing real said between us.

The wrongness of it burned just like the rest did, burned us just like fire.

It hit us out of step, out of control, Jim a little bit behind me. I must've made some kind of sound, said something, because I was hot and fast and shooting while he took his final strokes and even as he took them he was talking, whispering to me, telling me it was okay, we were both okay, and this wasn't wrong.

He said that again and again against my throat, so many times I knew it _was_ wrong, and knew he knew it too.

I rode him out. He deserved that much. And it was good to rest there on him while he found what he was looking for, good to feel his teeth in my skin when he let go.

It was better than I deserved.

In the silence between us when it was over, I tried to remember why we shouldn't have done what we did. Jim tried to stretch and banged his elbow on the steering wheel. "Ow. Shit. Who put that there?"

"Ford."

He looked up at me and smiled. I sucked in a breath, holding myself still. The light hit his eyes and his face, turned him golden. I'd never seen Jim look quite like that, and underneath me his body was relaxed and easy. He shifted the arm he'd banged up and edged out from the back of the seat to wrap himself around me.

He was just--beautiful. I could've lived on a look like that for a very long time. Something hot and scared broke loose in my chest; I tried to think of something to say but nothing would come. I wanted something I didn't know the name of, wanted it so bad I ached, but it wasn't mine. I'd seen him look at her, and I knew that without ever asking the question.

I said, "Karen."

Jim's body turned to rock.

"Man." I swallowed, pushed myself up. I could still taste him in my mouth, still feel him like a heat-shadow down the front of me. My crotch was damp and hot and liquid, still throbbing. "Jesus, Jim."

He sat up as I moved off him. Straightened his jacket, his shirt, everything I'd disarranged. One hand investigated the front of his jeans, and irritation bent his mouth down. I looked away.

"Forget about it," he said.

"I'm sorry."

"I said, forget it. It's okay."

"What are you--"

"I'm not going to do anything."

"In her place, I'd be wrecked."

"She's not gonna find out about it unless you put it in the paper, Sandburg. You think you can leave this chapter out?"

I found his eyes. I'd taken that warm and easy look and turned it arctic. "I'm sorry," I said. I shrugged, not sure what to do with my hands or my arms or anything, totally free of coordination.

"There's nothing to tell her, anyway," he said quietly, like he was answering a question I hadn't actually asked.

"Nothing." The heater was back on, but I was cold anyway, in a way that didn't have anything to do with the weather. "Okay."

"That's not what I meant." His eyes never left the road. "It's just nothing to do with her."

"Try telling her that."

"She's my girlfriend, Sandburg. Let me handle the guilt, okay?"

"I don't feel guilty." And that was only half a lie, because in a way I didn't, I just felt like I should feel guilty. Instead there was a tight, vicious satisfaction in my chest, ugly and cold, and it hit me that I'd won this round, Sandburg one, Fisher zero, and I hadn't even known there was a game on. "I feel pretty good, Jim."

He looked over at me, expressionless, _tabula rasa_. "Why?"

I almost said, _Because I needed it, I need you,_ but that was too selfish and I couldn't make the words come. I wanted to say, _Because you need me,_ but Jim had never liked to hear that.

I said, "Because I missed you."

His face tightened. "Yeah? That's funny. I never went anywhere."

"I just feel like you're out of my reach, sometimes. Like there's nothing between us, and everything I thought was there is just some kind of pipe dream."

"We're _friends_, isn't that what you said?"

"Until April." I looked out the window and didn't see a thing but my own reflection in the glass, and Jim's. Transparent, faded colors. Insubstantial. "Isn't that what you said?"

"I didn't set the deadline."

"It's a deadline for the paper. Not for us. That was your deal."

"We are the paper, Sandburg. When were we ever anything else?"

I was glad I was looking at the window because he didn't need to see my face then, and I didn't need him to see it. I couldn't figure out a way to look at him that wouldn't hurt, so I didn't look, and I didn't say anything, and I almost didn't breathe. After a while the silence stopped being the kind that waits for you to say something and started being the kind that doesn't want to be broken.

"I'm sorry."

I kept my eyes down, and devoted myself to fiddling with the heating vents.

He let out a loud, long breath that ended up obscene. "I'm sorry, Blair, okay? Christ, I say that six times a day."

"You ever wonder why?"

"I don't think you want me to answer that."

I looked up. It was like vertigo, looking at him, like I was falling and falling and my stomach wasn't falling with me. "This is crazy," I said, standing out there on a ledge. Looking down.

"Yeah."

"Jim, there is so much going on right now. There's classes and Karen and the paper and the station and I'm just fighting to stay on board here. I don't know--" I swallowed hard, looking out the window. "I don't know what's going on with you right now. I just know this is a lot more complicated than it used to be, and I'm having real trouble with it."

I heard his breath catch, then start again, faster. He shifted in his seat, folded his arms across his middle. "I know."

"I mean, first you go quiet on me and we're fighting all the time, and then you're off with this girl and want me to be all Mister Supportive Guy for you--which I have been to the very best of my ability, in the face of frilliness and _disease_\--and now we're just the paper, Jesus, and then this happens while you and Karen, you're--"

My hands were shaking, pressed down on my knees and still shaking; I felt like I was about to fly apart. Every rule broken, it was out there between us, the things we'd done with and to each other, all in the light. More words than we'd ever shared over this, more words in three minutes than in the last three years. I was over the cliff now, on the way down, falling down into the darkness.

"What is this, Jim?" I looked at the dash and blinked, and tried to keep my breathing steady. "You're running through my fingers like sand, you know? What else am I gonna lose here before we're done?"

Jim didn't say anything. He did reach out, he put a hand on top of my hand and his fingers tightened around it so hard there was actual pain, and I could feel him shaking too.

"This is insane."

"You've got so much on you," he said softly. "You spread yourself too thin."

"Yeah, well. Some days you're the bagel, some days you're the cheese."

He made a noise like a snort, only muffled, like he didn't want anything to do with laughing. "Yeah," he said. "I know." He started the engine, started the heater. Turned on the radio. He threw the truck into reverse, but kept his foot on the brake pedal. "I'm having some trouble too, Blair," he said, and my mouth went dry and the air went dead and electric between us.

It was over. I knew it deep and sure, in that way of knowing suddenly you've turned a corner you didn't even know was there and the corner has vanished behind you and there's no going backward out of that moment, only forward, and something has gone totally, deeply wrong forever.

Break the rules, break the spell. Too many words separating us, things that never should've been said.

There are things people can say to each other that can't be taken back. Things that make you different. Like that first time you scream "I hate you!" at your mother, and watch all the color drain out of her face--you look at her and see the lines around her eyes for the first time and all you can think, all you can say is "I didn't mean it" and "I take it back," but you've turned that corner. She's just never going to look the same again, and she's never going to look at you the same again, and all you can do from that moment on is be a better person than the one who just ended your childhood.

That's what it was like; I'd said the words that took us around this corner and now I was stuck on the other side of it. There was a different Jim Ellison on this side, a sadder and stronger one, the one who'd heard me say "complicated" and "trouble" and agreed with me, now that I'd given him the words for it. I didn't have to hear him to know what he was going to say next, but I listened anyway, palms wet, eyes wet, teeth clenched together so tight my jaw hurt. I looked straight ahead out the window, at the fountain, and listened to him like I couldn't see the future.

"I think it's about time we stopped pretending everything's okay," Jim said. "Don't you?"

"Is that what we're doing?"

"It's what I was doing. Christ, I'd like to just have one day where I didn't have to worry about what's going to happen the next day. I can't do this anymore."

"What are you afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid." His mouth twisted down and he turned to face the window. "I'm just sick of the merry-go-round. Every time I talk to you, you're somebody different."

"I'm... I just have a lot on my plate right now."

"I know that."

"I've got these roles to balance. Cop, teacher, partner, friend." I stumbled, and couldn't name the last one. "I know I'm really compartmentalizing. I just have to get through these next few months--"

"I think... I don't know, Blair. I think maybe we should just table this for now. Get through some stuff."

The words sucked all the air out of the space around us.

"Just table it." I tugged my jacket tight across my chest, huddling into it for warmth. Like I didn't have enough to worry about, he had to yank out from under me the only rug I had. "Shit."

"We've got to get our heads on straight. I don't know about you, but I'm all twisted up. It's not working like it used to."

"Jim."

"No," he said, voice harsh and thick. "You know it and I know it. Come on, Blair--how screwed up do we have to get before we admit it? You like this thing where we're always yelling and always messing each other up and always saying we're sorry? This isn't any fun for me anymore."

My teeth were trying to chatter. I clamped down with my jaw and turned the heater up a notch.

His voice dropped lower, warmer. "It's not any fun for you, either."

"No," I said. Quiet, but the words felt loud. "Not like this."

Jim blew air out through pursed lips, and laughed a really brittle kind of laugh. "Guess that settles it," he said. "Ready to go?"

A few miles down the road, I stopped shaking. The silence ate into the adrenaline, and after a while I could talk to him in something like a normal voice. We threw a few comments back and forth about the weather, about the Jags, about nothing.

We handled it well, all things considered. I was proud of us, in a way that made me a little sick to my stomach. By the time I got home, I was focused.

I wrote for hours, until my eyes burned and my back screamed with pain and my fingers ached and couldn't find the keys any more. I wrote until all I could feel was the writing, until the words and the numbers turned into one solid river in my mind and washed away everything I wasn't ready to face.

I wrote until two a.m. Chapters three and four were done when I finally closed the laptop and fell onto my bed, still dressed, half-unconscious.

If the paper was all that we were, then we were a lie, because the paper was--start to finish.

I wanted it over.

  
   


* * *

  
   


I should've seen it coming, but writing can absorb you. You go out to dinner and find yourself scribbling on napkins. You wake up from a daze in the middle of a conversation and you have no idea whose turn it is to talk but you've got half your next chapter outlined in your head, the words lined up like good soldiers. You spend half your life writing and the other half trying to get to someplace you can write. To some extent--sometimes more than others--the world fades into the background, forgotten.

It's like any other drug that way. Sometimes it can swallow you whole.

The next morning, when I stumbled into the kitchen after purging those chapters from my brain, I wasn't expecting anything past maybe some orange juice. That Jim had breakfast waiting was just a bonus, and I dug into it like it was the last I'd ever have. Between bites I checked him out, drinking in the green sweater and the jeans and the Jags cap from the corner of my eye. He always looked good in the morning, clean-shaven, with his hair still wet from the shower. I wanted to touch his hair but after yesterday, I couldn't, and honestly--even before yesterday it would have fallen outside the scope of our rules. Such as they were.

So I didn't touch him, but I did watch him; we didn't have rules about that. He was working his way up to something, gathering courage between sips of coffee. I thought it was cute, and a little annoying, right up until he opened his mouth and said the last thing I ever expected to hear.

While I sat at the table with my fork in one hand, the warm curve of a coffee mug in the other, Jim looked at me with bright, flat, curious eyes. A hundred different responses died in my mouth.

"Say that again," I said finally. I took a bite of my eggs to show that I was still functional, still in the ball game.

Jim raised his cup and took a long draw from it, steam rising up around his eyes like a veil. He held it there in front of his mouth, elbows propped on the table, and didn't say anything.

"Jesus." I put the fork down. Pushed the mug and my plate away. "I don't believe you, man."

"Look, I'm not saying we give her our life story here, Sandburg. Just maybe a blurb and a quick review."

All I could think was, _shit, she has everything now_. It was right there in the center of my heart, this horrible, ugly, angry wad of--I don't know what. Jealousy wasn't strong enough for it, and it wasn't the right word anyway. I felt violated, in a way that made me want to vomit or scream or hit something or maybe take a shower. I was shaking, and I knew he could see it and that pissed me off even more. There was this huge grinning monkey of bad karma sitting on my back while I wished hateful things on Karen and Jim separately and together, and then there was this other voice, thin and selfish and cold, and it said to me, _Fuck this, Sandburg, you don't need this, you've got a chapter to write_.

I stood up and paced. I'm good at pacing; it clears my head, and sometimes my head needs a lot of clearing. The length of the couch, five steps by five, hands shoved deep into my pockets to keep from fidgeting. Tension vibrated through me like a harp string.

"So you know that this is like, totally your fault, right? Clark Kent was better at hiding his secret identity than you."

"I'm not Superman, Sandburg."

"Bruce Wayne was better at it, too."

"I think we have to tell her."

"I haven't forgotten the topic of conversation."

"What did you think? That it was going to be our little secret forever? I was gonna lie to everybody for the rest of my unnatural life?"

"Your life is totally natural," I said. Reflex. And then, because honesty pushed me to it: "I hadn't really gotten that far."

"I have. And I'll tell you, I'd a hell of a lot rather have her find out from me than hear it on the evening news. We're over halfway to April. What chapter are you on?"

My heart slammed into my rib cage over and over, and I knew he heard it, I knew. Hell, I could hear it myself. There was a metallic taste in my mouth; sour, like touching a battery to your tongue. Adrenaline was the chemical term. The common term was 'fear.'

"I'm not going to let that happen. You know I'm not going to let that happen, Jim, come on. You know that."

He looked away, and I took a step closer to the table. "Jim?"

"Yeah." The admission came out quiet. "I know that."

"Fuck. Don't do that to me." I was shaking so hard I didn't think my knees would hold out. "Jesus."

Jim met my eyes. "I'm sorry. I know you're looking out for me."

"Thank God."

He shook his head. "It doesn't change anything, Sandburg. Maybe I don't get blasted across the headlines the day you turn that thing in, but what does happen after that? You think my senses are going to settle down like magic and I'll suddenly have perfect control? It's not going away, and you are, and I can't do this alone."

"Jim, I'm not going to leave you to deal with it alone. I'd never do that to you."

"I don't want a keeper. I want a partner." He took a deep breath, and looked down into his coffee mug. "I've been with Karen for a while now. It's good with her."

_I don't want a keeper_. "I can't do this right now," I said.

"She's easy to be with. I can relax around her. Be myself. I want to be able to tell her what I am."

"I cannot do this right now, Jim, okay? Please." The thin, chill voice was back and I was over the edge. Another month and I'd have the resources for it, another month and I'd have an emotion that lasted long enough to identify it before it changed into something else, but not today. I didn't have anything today.

"She's got a right to know. She's got a stake, and I'm gonna need somebody around me who knows."

"Out with the old, in with the new, huh? You've known her what, three months? On this and a mutual respect for Dana Scully you expect to build a life together?"

"You have to start somewhere."

All the air in the room turned to stone. Breathing was a pleasant myth, a thing of the past. Speaking was impossible. Moving was entirely out of the question. Maybe it was me who turned to stone.

"Say something."

I couldn't think of anything to say. I was still trying to figure out how my lungs worked. I wasn't sure if my voice would work if I thought of any words worth saying.

And then he stood up. He took a step toward me, closed some of the distance, and everything came together.

"When? When are you going to tell her?"

He blinked. Surprised, I think, that I'd actually come up with a question. "I hadn't really gotten that far."

"You're not in love with her."

"How would you know who I love and who I don't?"

"I may not know how you act when you're in love, but I know how you act when you're lying to yourself, Jim. I've had plenty of occasion to study that phenomenon."

"You don't know a God damn thing, Sandburg." He shoved me away, his hands on my shoulders vicious and tight, and made for the door. I watched him pick up his keys and shrug into his jacket; I felt still and apart. Icy, on the inside. When he put his hand on the doorknob I went to him and took that hand away.

We stood there, his hand in mine. I squeezed, felt the bones shift under his skin. "I know you don't love her." I did know it, all through me, the same way I knew I was losing him if we didn't get it right this time.

"You don't know anything about me."

"I wrote the book, man."

"And you never let me forget it for a second, do you." He pulled his hand out of mine and opened the door; stood there looking at me, and his eyes were so sad my chest started to hurt.

"How do you expect me to watch this?" My throat was raw; the words burned. "You think I get off on seeing you rip yourself up? Tell me how I get on the other side of this, Jim, 'cause I'm not seeing the sanity here."

"You write," he said. There was hate in there, vicious and brittle and dark. "That's what you do best, isn't it? Every day, you watch and you write and every couple of weeks you turn in another chapter of that paper of yours and that's what you do. That's your thing, the thing that gets all your attention. That's your world."

"That is a completely and totally inaccurate representation of reality."

"It's true. It's the truest thing I know."

"I pay attention to you. You're just about the only thing in my life that gets my undivided attention. What have I been doing these past four years? My whole life has been about you since the day I met you, Jim. I'm always paying attention."

"If you paid attention, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"Say that in the language of my people."

"If you paid attention," he said, "you'd know what I look like when I'm in love."

"I've been watching you with her. I haven't seen it."

He smiled. It was--it hurt. Looking at him. That smile was beautiful the way a knife is beautiful. Cold, and strong, and sharper than any look I'd ever seen from him. "You've left no room for speculation about my place in your life, Sandburg, and I appreciate that. I do."

"Then--"

"Shut up. Just listen, okay?" He waited for my nod; I gave it. "The thing is, I can't go there with you. I'm sorry about that. Maybe I don't get some stupid fairy tale ending out of this, fine, but it's not all or nothing. Karen loves me, and that's special, and I'll take that over--this--any day. We can't be what we are to each other now, forever."

"That's--that's not what I want. Where do you get that?"

"I get it from life. It's exactly what you want. You want all the parts my best friend gets and all the rest, too, but the rest doesn't mean anything, Sandburg, not between us. Not like this. I give you all that, it leaves nothing for me to stand on. Do you get that?"

I shook my head. There wasn't any sense to it. He was so far off in left field the field itself was just a memory. "Do you have some kind of crystal ball? You're a mind-reader now, you know exactly what I want?"

"I know exactly what you give. And I know what you won't take. The rest was easy."

"Man, what part of any of this is easy?"

"Your part," he said. And turned away from me, so far away I couldn't measure.

"Ask me what I want."

"I don't have to. Besides, I don't think you know."

"You think. That's what it's all about, huh? You think about it, you decide, and later you let me in on it if I'm lucky? Why didn't you ever just for God's sake ask me, Jim?"

"I didn't need you to lie to me."

"Oh, man. That's a fear-based response if I ever heard one. Ask me already. "

"What do you want, Blair?" He threw the words at me like bullets.

_I want us to stop trying to kill what we have here. I want to forget all the nasty shit we've said to each other and yeah, I want to finish my paper, Jim, because you hate it and I've started to hate it too and I don't know any other way to get it out of our lives. I want back what I used to have--_

"I want time."

He'd looked away, but his eyes snapped back when I said it, wide and clear and scared.

"What?"

"Don't tell Karen anything. Don't decide anything. Don't leave me alone in this, not yet."

"Jesus."

He sat down hard on the couch, head in his hands, shaking, and I went to him fast, on my knees on the floor beside him. I pulled his hands away from his face and made him look at me, really look at me.

"Give me a week, Jim. Like you did when I moved in, remember? One week, just to get the paper done and out of the way, and then we settle this. Okay?"

"The paper."

"Yeah. The paper. The worst fucking idea I ever had. I wish I'd never heard of it. I'd trash it if it didn't mean trashing my whole career. You give me that week, you let me finish it, and I promise you, Jim. I promise you, I'll find a way to fix whatever I broke here."

"After the paper," he said. He watched me with a sharpness I hadn't seen in a long time, like I might do anything and he needed to be ready.

"You asked what I wanted."

"Is there an 'after the paper'? You really think we come out okay on the other side of it?"

"There has to be, Jim." I looked at him and I wanted to say something else, I wanted to take that look off his face forever. "There has to be, don't you think?"

"I don't know what I think."

"Then let's just--table it. For a little while, Jim, just table it, okay?"

"Christ, Sandburg. Is it--is it really that easy for you?"

The cold I'd wrapped around myself was no defense against how tired he looked, how miserable I'd made him. He looked like he hadn't slept at all. Like maybe he hadn't been sleeping for a very long time.

I closed my eyes. So many things in my head I wanted to say, but nothing I said was ever the right thing, not for long. Lying didn't work, honesty didn't work, reassurances, promises--it was useless to say anything, and with that certainty in me, I couldn't even open my mouth.

The silence stretched out, and the time when I could've said something passed.

Jim scrubbed his hands over his face once and stood up. He looked around, lost in his own home for just a second, then collected his coffee cup and went back to the kitchen.

"Not long now," I said. "Two more chapters to go."

"Sounds like the home stretch."

I swallowed hard, and nodded. I couldn't look away. "Yeah." I said it low, soft, easy as I could. "Please, Jim."

He ran a hand over his hair and broke the look between us. "I don't think I can do this much longer."

"It'll be okay."

"I don't know." His face was slack and pale. There was a nervous flutter in his hands, and he stilled them by clasping them together over his stomach. "Maybe."

"One week." I said it like a promise, which it was, and I held his eyes until he internalized it. He nodded slowly, fighting himself all the way; I could see it in the tendons of his neck, the straight line of his back. "End of February. This gets better, Jim," I said softly. "Not long now."

"Okay." He shook his head, rubbed a hand over his face. His eyes were clear and steady. "One week."

**IV.**

Seven days sounded like a long time. It wasn't. I spent the first day in the library, and the words wouldn't hang together. I wrote and deleted, wrote and deleted, until I felt like I was going crazy and I had no facility for this, no skill. From my notes I managed to build a fifth chapter--the skeleton of one anyway--but the sixth wouldn't come.

Sean Flanagan found me in a carrel by the heating vents, wrapped up like an Eskimo. It was just so fucking cold in Cascade in the winter. Lately it felt like there was no warmth left in the world at all.

"Shall I bring you a blanket then, Sandburg?"

I looked up and found him standing over me. He was wearing a white windbreaker and a red rain coat over a t-shirt and jeans. The man was insane. It had to be at least a hundred below out there. His hair was sticking up from the wind, and his nose was bright pink.

"What're you supposed to be? Santa Claus? You're late. Christmas was two months ago."

"I take it from your continuing sunny disposition that the last chapter isn't going well."

"I can't write," I said. "I suck."

"I seem to recall reading several articles over the course of the years by Blair Sandburg. Most of them were quite readable. You do have a bit of a tendency toward fanciful descriptions, but age will take care of that."

"This is different."

And it was. Two deadlines now, for the price of one.

Sean reached down and patted me on the shoulder. "It always is, Blair. You'll do fine."

"I don't think that's possible."

"Listen. Marie Danforth's retirement party is commencing as we speak at O'Flaherty's. Shut yourself down here and come along with me. The break will do you good."

"I can't stop writing now, Sean."

"As far as I can see," he said kindly, "you haven't started yet. If you're going to fail to write, you should do it in company, and away from the source of the problem. Trust me; I'm far older and far wiser than you will ever be."

I shut down the laptop. I had six days to worry. This one night wouldn't kill me.

  
   


* * *

  
   


"Sandburg, come on. Wake up, that's a good boy...."

I blinked, expecting light, but there was just a thin strip of it spilling through my open door. My eyes felt like sandpaper; my tongue tasted like tequila. I remembered an Irish-style pub and a lot of margaritas; they hadn't mixed well. Jim leaned over me, a vague outline in the shadows.

"Whatimeis't?"

"Time to get dressed. Guess who just got caught crawling through a young lady's window in the Heights?"

"Shit." I sat up, instantly awake between one second and the next, heart racing. "Wilson."

Jim's grin was wide and hungry. "Oh, yeah."

"How did you know?"

"I'm very, very smart."

"Did he have a gun?"

"Rumor has it."

"Shit." I grinned at him, matching the look in his eyes, and swung my legs over the bed. "We got him."

I got dressed fast, yesterday's jeans and a fresh sweater over a t-shirt. Jim met me at my door with a cup of coffee; I drank it so fast I burned a layer of skin off my tongue, but it was good and it kept me warm on the drive downtown. Jim filled me in as we drove through the sleeted streets, and all I could think about was how fucking lucky we were.

Wilson was nailed by a patrol-car. A few minutes earlier, a few minutes later, and we'd be driving to a homicide instead of just down to the station. Jim and I didn't have anything to do with the collar, but it was Jim's case, and it was over, and he was right. Somehow he'd known all along.

I was so proud of that it was scary.

Dawn was graying in the sky when we pulled into the parking garage; it was six-thirty p.m. by the time we pulled back out again. Part of it was paper work, but Jim spent a good five hours in the box with Wilson. Every time he came out, he looked fried and haunted; there were circles under his eyes that hadn't been there at five in the morning. I took up permanent residence in his shadow, and watched him constantly through the one-way mirror. Wilson was clearly insane, and talking to him wasn't easy for Jim. It wore him thin in a way I didn't like.

It was already dark when we finally got out on the streets. Jim drove us to Tonio's without being asked; I went in and grabbed a couple of subs to take back home. We ate quietly at the table, just staring wide-eyed and vacant at the food in front of us. I cleaned up when we were done, turned out the lights, and watched Jim walk up the stairs.

I wanted to walk up there with him. I almost did; I know he would've let me. He'd never said no to me, not in all the time I'd known him. It was dark in his room, and warm. I could have gone up the stairs into that warmth with him; we both needed it, the familiarity of it, the sanity. He took the stairs so slowly I thought maybe he was waiting for me to catch up with him, and at the top of them, he stopped and turned around.

For a long time neither of us said anything. The quiet stretched out thin and fragile between us until I had to break it or go to him or break down on the spot.

"Jim--"

"Go to bed, Blair."

I swallowed around a hard, painful knot in my throat. "You did good today."

"I did my job."

"You did great. You were amazing, man. You took Wilson apart."

"Go to bed, Sandburg."

He moved, and there was just the darkness where he'd been standing. Empty, and still.

I was tired down into my bones, and I hadn't thought about the paper at all, not even once. My room was dark and colder than it ought to be. I fell into bed fully clothed and wrapped the blankets tight around me.

I dreamed in print.

  
   


* * *

  
   


In winter, days are shorter. In Cascade, in winter, you can multiply that by a factor of ten. I don't know how much time I spent that week just lying in my bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling. I felt like I'd been vaporized, like I couldn't get a grip on anything. Jim was up there alone, waiting for me to do something miraculous to take us back to a time when we'd been okay with each other, and all I could do was drift. I didn't have any quick fixes in me, not for this.

I did write. In the end, I did it because it had to be done and because it was a way to feel--I don't know, a way to get a sense of Jim's presence, somewhere close by. For two days I just put down one word after another, linking them into sentences and paragraphs that I never looked at again once I'd written them.

Jim watched me. Not overtly; he was too good for that. I could feel his eyes on me, though, when I moved from my room to the kitchen, or back again. In the middle of the second day, I stopped coming out.

On the third day, Karen called. I heard Jim answer the phone, and I heard his voice go quiet and soft. My door was open, and so I listened for ten minutes while he talked to her and laughed and talked some more. The taste of adrenaline was bitter and sharp on my tongue, and my thoughts fuzzed over. I waited a decent five minutes after he hung up, then went over and shut the door carefully, shutting him out and everything else along with him.

Writing is all about focus. That's what I told myself.

I hit page 195 sometime after midnight on the night before my birthday. The night before the last day of my last week. I figured there were maybe five pages left, and I figured I could do five pages in one day, easy. There should've been a sense of victory or something.

I just felt numb.

When I shut down the laptop, I went out into the living room. Jim was long since in bed; he had an early morning ahead of him, he'd have to be up around five. I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up. Wishing I had the courage to go up to him, and wondering what he'd say to me if I did.

I didn't go back into my room. There was an afghan hanging over the back of the longer couch; I wrapped up in it and stretched out, relaxing in slow, quiet breaths. There was nothing between Jim and me but air and darkness now.

Sleep snuck up on me. I wasn't sure when it hit, but it hit hard. I woke up with the afghan tangled around my feet and another blanket, thick and warm, draped over me and the couch. It smelled like Old Spice and color-safe all-temperature Cheer. Jim's.

There was coffee in the kitchen, still warm.

Morning of the last day. Only five pages to go.

  
   


* * *

  
   


Since I started riding with Jim we had this birthday tradition of pretending birthdays didn't exist. I could never really afford a decent gift and Jim, I guess, didn't want to outshine me too much. On my first birthday after we met, we went out to dinner at The Broken Pipe, a kind of out-there combination of club and cafˆ© I didn't even know Jim knew about. He drove us there all casual, talking about a case, and by the time we got into the parking space I was high as a kite. I don't know, I guess he just grabbed a co-ed at Rainier one day and asked for a cool place to eat that cost a million dollars a plate. We strolled in, grabbed a table, and ate some of the worst food known to man.

I had a blast. The music was great, Jim picked up the tab, and the b-word never got spoken.

When Jim's birthday rolled around, I didn't really know what to do. What do you feed a guy who thinks Wonderburger is haute cuisine? Turns out, you feed him Wonderburger. You just make sure you feed it to him when he's hungry and appreciative. I brought in a huge, steaming bag of cardiac arrest in the middle of a three a.m. work shift, with a king-sized chocolate malt as a sidecar. It cost about twelve dollars and one night's sleep all together, and the next day I felt like there were two rabid badgers battling to the death in my gut. For the next week, every time I caught Jim looking at me across the papers and files piled all over his desk, he was grinning.

So was I.

And that was the way it worked, just food and friendship and nothing really wild or out of the way. I didn't like much of a fuss, and Jim didn't either. I don't think Simon or the guys knew or cared when my birthday was, but I certainly wasn't by myself in the ranks of the uncelebrated. Megan Connor is the only cop we ever threw a party for, and that was just 'cause Brian Rafe lives in hope.

I wasn't expecting much this time around. Truth? I wasn't actually expecting anything. Jim promised me a week; he didn't promise anything else. Alexandria called out of the blue at four to say we had reservations at Jason Brandt's--a kind of upscale refuge for the hip and wealthy, new enough to still have some shine on it. The hiatus was apparently over, but I got the feeling we weren't going dutch.

I spent all that afternoon detaching with love from my savings account.

I got to the station twenty minutes after my class let out; Jim wasn't anywhere in sight. I attached myself to my desk via keyboard. I wrote for a while, hated every word, and started over. There was a demon in my head and its name was _deadline_ and it was coming fast. Every time I opened up Microsoft Word I'd get the shakes, I'd see Jim standing at the top of the stairs in the shadows, the way he had looked when he asked me what I wanted. I wanted the paper finished, I wanted space to breathe and look at Jim and fix whatever was going wrong with us, but every word I typed felt like some kind of betrayal--of Jim, of me, of my scientific ethics, everything. Everything I believed in.

I needed to write and writing hurt so I wrote faster so it would be over faster and when it got too bad, when I couldn't breathe, I stopped.

Two pages short of the end, not another word would come.

By one o'clock I'd given up on Jim. I didn't know what I could say to him when he got there. I thought about lying--I thought about typing "the end" and calling it a day. But I couldn't do either of those things. There was an emptiness buzzing around in my head, a sense of being very close to change. Whatever was coming, I couldn't catch hold of it. I couldn't affect it. Not in any way that would matter.

I'd stowed the laptop and was halfway into bailing when Rafe and Brown got called out. I rode along; it looked good for our pathetic, tattered cover-story and Simon seemed in favor of it.

We got back a little after five. Rafe had bug-eyes and I was more than a little bit shaky. Brown was at Emergency with a slice taken out of his shoulder, but he was fine and his mom and his sister were with him. Jim and Simon were on their way out to see him when we staggered in, the heroic walking wounded.

Jim translocated; he was on me so fast I almost heard the air displacement. Obviously my state of disrepair had not been part of Rafe's preliminary report. Jim tilted my head back for a better look at where the blood had come from, whispering so softly and sweetly it took me a few seconds to recognize the four-letter words and to realize what he was saying to me wasn't all that flattering.

"What the hell happened?" Simon demanded, towering over both of us.

"I fell."

"Off of what?"

"The wall this really big dude threw me at mere seconds befo--ow. Ow! Jim, cut that out, okay?"

He backed off, just a little, just so far his hands weren't actively molesting any part of me that hurt. He was still touching me, though, which felt pretty good, because I was in dire need of a steadying influence. Nobody seemed to notice the hovering, at least not as anything unusual; I relaxed into it, letting Jim do what Jim did best. When he reached out to examine the cut on my head again, I grabbed for his wrist to stop him. He winced.

I looked at him. For a second I wasn't thinking of my own pain. "What happened to you?"

"Nothing."

"Bullshit. What did you do to your wrist?"

"Some guy cracked wise with me and I popped him one," Jim said. "Hard."

"Hard enough to sprain your wrist?"

"Let that be a lesson."

"We're here to talk about you, Sandburg," Simon said. "Can we stay on task here?"

"Back to the beginning," Jim ordered, with a set to his jaw that told me the fun and games were over. "Start with why you were out with Rafe and Brown."

"Simon sent me."

Simon abruptly stopped towering. Jim looked up at him, waiting, and all at once I had a front row seat at _The Incredible Shrinking Police Captain_. He went from six foot two to five-nine in the blink of an eye.

"The kid was bored," Simon said loudly. "It was just a routine call." When Jim kept waiting, Simon raised both hands. "Okay, I'm sorry, I thought it was a good idea at the time."

Jim smiled, and Simon smiled back, relieved.

I wasn't relieved. I'd seen Jim smile like that before.

"So you were with Rafe and Brown," he said. "On a routine call."

"Yeah." I nodded, which hurt a lot, and eased myself down into Jim's desk chair. Jim eased over with me, keeping an eye on me, flipping back and forth between field medic and bad-ass partner like he'd been doing it for--well, about four years. It was the last day of my last week and I had only two pages to go, and I could make that, if I had to, to keep this comfort between us.

"And then what?" Jim prompted. "Sandburg?" He waved a hand in front of my face.

"And then while we were on that call another call came in over the radio, and we were like the only ship in the quadrant, you know? So we had to go. Rafe told me," I said, in the spirit of honesty, "that I really should stay in the car."

"Worked about as well as could be expected," Rafe said, rolling his eyes.

"I was glued to my seat till H started screaming like a woman."

Simon stepped in front of me--I don't know what he thought was wrong with Rafe's mouth--and smiled. "Tell me what happened right now," he said. His teeth were showing, at least the first row of them.

"Okay, this lady, she's a witness in one of Brown's cases, that Anne Flynne art show thing. Says she actually saw one of the guys who stole the sculpture in question, checking it out right before the show. Anyway, she calls and tells the duty sergeant she's scared this guy is after her, she's been getting strange phone calls and her husband isn't home and she lives on the outskirts of town."

"She's a flake," Rafe said. "Sarge calls for a car and we're the lucky winners. We get there and she's running around in her nightgown with more mascara on than she has eyeball."

"Tell them about the flirting. I liked that part."

"There was flirting," Rafe said, and clamped his mouth shut.

That wasn't like he told it in the car on the way to the hospital.

"She took them to the bedroom to show them where she thought she saw this guy lurking at her window." I leaned back against Jim's desk, taking the weight off an ankle that was starting to throb. "Only then--"

"Only then the husband who wasn't home to scare away the imaginary art-thief-cum-stalker comes home and finds his wife and two guys in his bedroom, and all due respect to the lady, you can tell it's not the first time something like this has happened." Rafe looked from Jim to Simon, then over to me. "It wasn't!"

"And I'm guessing that's when the yelling started. I'm sitting out there in the car, and realizing all H has in there to listen to is Tom Lehrer and the Righteous Brothers, and all of a sudden I hear this noise, Jim," I looked up at him, making sure I had his trusting attention, "and this noise, it's like Freddy Krueger on estrogen or something, and that's when I decided I should go in and check things out. And when I got in there, this guy was throwing Henry around the room and finally right through the window."

"And then he grabbed Sandburg," Rafe finished. "Threw him like a shotput. Probably a world record."

I grinned. "Yeah, if anthropologist-throwing were an Olympic sport...."

"It ought to be," Jim said, shaking his head.

Simon didn't say anything. He just rubbed the back of his neck like he was in pain. I could've told him something about pain; my head felt like the inside of a bass drum on parade.

Jim took a minute to process while studying the ceiling, a technique I'd taught him for minimizing visual input. It helped him concentrate, and when he was done he looked over at Rafe, head tilted to one side. "Where were you during all this assaulting and battering?"

Rafe lowered his shoulders and raised his chin. "Assessing the situation," he said calmly. "And calling for backup."

"Yeah." I looked at him and grinned. "From inside the closet."

Rafe shut his eyes, and I turned my smile on Jim. He grinned back at me, shaking his head.

Score.

That signaled the end of Simon's patience; he leaned over, got right into my face, and said, very quietly: "Do you know what I would like for you to do for me right now, Sandburg?"

"Go home?"

He smiled. "You're as smart as you look."

"Thanks," I said. "Kind of."

  
   


* * *

  
   


Rafe did the paperwork, Simon went to the hospital, and Jim steered me out to the truck. I felt good, in a weird way--hyped with adrenaline, all dressed up and no place to go. I was ready to get home and write the best two pages of my life; I had the shape of the ending in my head, clear and perfect, so clear and perfect I knew it wouldn't last past the first traffic light.

When we climbed up into the cab Jim felt me jittering, and gave me a look I'd seen before. I just smiled and shrugged; it wasn't like I could help it. I didn't _like_ getting tossed around, but it was the kind of thing that got your blood pumping. I was trying to think of a non-psychotic way of expressing that when I noticed we weren't headed home.

"Forget where we live, Jim?" I asked at the next stop light.

He looked over at me, then down at his watch. Then back up at me. "It's almost six-thirty, chief. Forget about your birthday?"

I hadn't forgotten. I thought maybe he had, or that maybe it didn't matter with the bigger problem hanging over us, and so I guess I let go of it. Tried not to think about it, knew better than to talk about it, another black hole of quiet between me and Jim, right? What's one more or less, between good friends?

I started to sweat.

I thought this birthday was going to be different. There was no real reason for it to be different, even Karen wasn't a good reason--this was just a guy thing, just a Jim and Blair thing, separate from the other stuff we didn't talk about. But that not-talking thing covered birthdays and the bedroom, and I'd conflated them in my head. If we didn't do the one we didn't do the other.

But that was kind of nuts. Not talking about birthdays was a whole other kind of not talking.

It took about a second for all that to rush through my mind and end up wide-eyed and grinning on my face. The panic got lost in the way Jim was looking at me--eyes calm, every line of him patient and hopeful.

"Dinner? Don't I need to get cleaned up? Most places don't let you in if you're like, bleeding from the head."

Jim nodded, satisfied that I was along for the ride, and turned back to the road just as the light went green. "You can clean up when we get there."

"Get where?"

"Where we're going."

"Where _are_ we going, Jim?"

"A little place I know."

"You really get off on this strong and silent routine, don't you." I grinned like an idiot when he laughed at me.

So, I was almost a cop, I was a cop's partner anyway; I could figure this out. I watched the street signs flash by in the headlights, looked for landmarks. When we passed St. Michael and turned left onto Beverly, I started to get tense.

"Jim."

"Yeah?"

"This is the way to your Dad's place."

He looked over quick, smiling. "You get a gold star, Doctor Sandburg."

"Your dad's coming with us?" Was it possible to feel like a freeloader physically? The few times I'd exchanged more than a 'hi' with Jim's father I got the feeling the man liked me, was impressed with my brain, and was totally certain I was eating off Jim's meal ticket. The disturbing thing was, I got the feeling _that_ kind of impressed him, too.

"Yeah," Jim said, rolling his eyes. "Because we both feel so comfortable around him and gee, you just kinda look like you miss the guy."

"Well, look, I can't help but think it's a little tacky to go to his place and shower and not invite him out to dinner with us. So, maybe we should just go home. We have a real nice shower at home, Jim. It might even be clean."

"Relax, Sandburg. Sally's got the night off and Dad's not home. Friday's his night to cruise the country club for chicks."

That image cracked us both up. I laughed so hard I started snorting, which totally embarrassed me and amused him. Relief flooded into me like a river over its banks, and I thought, _okay, I can do this, everything's going to be fine_. His driving suffered with the laughter, and it's not that great to start with. I sank down in the seat when I could breathe normally again, and looked over at him with very badly concealed curiosity.

He ignored me. He did it with his typical skill and dedication. When we pulled into his dad's driveway and he turned off the engine and the lights, I was still in the land of the alternatively clued.

There were floods throwing pools of white light from the corners of the roof, and a couple off to the side of the front door lighting up the house like it was on display. In this neighborhood it probably was. I wondered what it must've been like to live inside a three-story status symbol, and my brain just wouldn't wrap around it. We sat in the truck while the heat bled away, quiet for a long time, till our breath made white fans in front of us. When I looked over at him he seemed hunched in on himself, smaller somehow in the leather shell of his jacket.

He turned to me. Our eyes met, and I was looking at a stranger. I was looking at the guy who belonged to this house, a guy I didn't think I'd ever met--stranger wasn't the word. Everything I didn't know about him rose up between us like a wall and he was more than strange, he was actually alien. Beautiful and unreachable and different from me in ways I couldn't even begin to comprehend.

He blinked, and reached to open his door, and the illusion fell away. Or maybe it was the reality that fell away and let the Jim Ellison I could cope with reassert himself. I shivered, and wrapped my jacket tighter around me as I climbed out.

He came around to my side of the car, and put a hand between my shoulder blades. "Ready?" he said--gently, head tilted to one side, like he knew how weird this was for me.

I squared my shoulders and willed myself to relax. This was going to be fun. Educational. "I'm ready," I said, and nodded, and moved when he nudged me forward. He unlocked the door with a key from his own key ring.

I'm such a liar.

  
   


* * *

  
   


Dinner was just dinner. I think Jim made spaghetti. I don't remember what it tasted like; just the way he looked hunched over the stove. The counter level was lower here than at the loft. Jim said his father had built the house for his mother before Jim was born, so I guess maybe Grace Ellison wasn't very tall. There were a couple times while we ate, I don't know--time got away from me, something.... I'd look across the table at him and not hear a word he was saying, I'd just see this kid, ten years old, fifteen, looking back at me with Jim's eyes and Jim's intensity. There were pictures of him and Stephen in the entry hallway and they were like ghosts in the house, surprising me out of the corners of my eyes.

We talked about the past. Jim talked, anyway. I listened to him in a kind of stupor, afraid to say anything. I didn't want to break the spell. The whole night, it was like a timer had gone off somewhere in Jim's head and his life came spilling out for me, on cue. I felt like I'd heard it in the back of my own head since I met him, ticking away the seconds till this moment. I wondered if it started ticking every time Jim met somebody; if maybe I won this show and tell just by sticking around so long.

I wondered what I'd find out next year. And I came to the conclusion, which wasn't really a conclusion but a revelation instead, a sudden lizard-brain epiphany, that I had to stick around for that. I wanted to, and that was what hanging around with Jim was all about. I wasn't just hanging around. I was hanging around for this. And I'd known it all along but this was the first time I'd said it to myself, because you don't just go around saying to yourself things that are patently obvious fact. You don't wake up one morning and suddenly say to yourself, Hey, I eat food every day because I have to have food to live. You just get up and eat.

"Am I talking to myself?"

I blinked, surfaced. "What?"

Jim smiled, warm and easy. He waved his fork over the table between us. "I guess this is a lot to take in."

"No. I mean--yeah, Jim, it is a lot. It's a lot more than I expected, and it's just--"

"A lot to take in."

I smiled. "Yeah. But in a good way. I'm just... I guess I'm surprised. And glad. That you're trusting me like this. I didn't think you did. Would. Again. I mean...."

"Sandburg."

"I'm just kind of babbling now, huh."

"Kind of, yeah."

I looked down at my plate, and thought, _oh, spaghetti_. I dug my fork in. I could feel myself go hot and red.

"You said you needed the whole mosaic."

I had a mouthful of food and I couldn't answer him. My eyes went up and met his, asking the obvious question.

"During that Yakuza case. To understand what was going on with me. You know. For the paper."

His voice was so soft, so quiet, I almost couldn't hear him. But I did hear him, and I think maybe I heard more than he was saying, because how easy could that have been? The guy nails himself daily to the cross of my academic ambition and on the days I forget to ask him to, he reminds me. I felt like I should be doing something, something important, and it was only when things started to go fuzzy that I remembered, _oh, yeah, breathing_.

I chewed slowly, thinking back to those days, the things I'd said to him. Buying space for myself, buying a little time. When I could, I said, "The one with the ATF chick? Drennan?"

"I think of that one as the one with the evil virgin chick. You know, Maya."

"That was only the first one with the evil virgin chick."

"I hate to break this to you, Sandburg, but I don't think she was a virgin for the second one."

"That's so tacky, Jim," I said, grinning. Then, "The one with the undercover FBI chick, then. And all the nifty motorcycles."

His eyes crinkled at the edges and he laughed, pointing at me with his fork. "A little respect for the ladies of law enforcement, kid."

"Hey, I'm not the one who had to date both of 'em. I treated them with the utmost professional courtesy."

"I treated Drennan with the utmost professional courtesy."

"Yeah, 'cause she turned you down flat. Remember, man, that was before the doors."

"You _listened_?"

"Wasn't my idea to hang a _curtain_ for privacy, Ebeneezer."

Jim frowned. He reached up to scratch at the back of his neck, looking at the table. When his eyes flicked back up to mine, he looked a little hunted. "How much could you hear through that thing?"

"A substantial portion of the mosaic," I said, letting my grin get out of hand.

He turned bright red, smiled wide, and said, "Liar."

I rolled my eyes. "I don't know, Jim. This tendency toward denying reality, I think it's something you might wanna bring up in therapy."

"I'm not the only one in denial here, chief," he said, and he blinked after he said it, his mouth snapping shut, like he was surprised to hear himself say what he'd said. He studied the warm, polished wood grain of the table for a second and then looked up at me, and he didn't explain himself or take it back. He just made the best of it.

"What's that supposed to mean?" My voice came out funny, hitched in the middle and quiet.

"You tell me." Whatever was wrong with my voice was wrong with his, too. I was going to say something, but he reached out across the table and picked up my hand. Turned it over. Put his inside it, slid it right into my palm and my fingers curled up by instinct, trapping it and holding on.

I looked down at our joined hands and there was nothing in my mind, just a blank space of not understanding. His fingers were cold, he always had the coldest hands of anybody I knew, and I held on tighter to give him some of my own heat. I thought, _B12. Maybe B6_. And I thought, _I'm holding hands with Jim Ellison_. I said, "Your hand is cold, Jim," and he snatched it away, and my own hand was colder without it. I missed the touch, missed it in a place I hadn't known was there.

"You done?" He grabbed my plate before I could answer.

"B12."

He was at the sink and he didn't turn. "Excuse me?"

"Or maybe B6, I can never tell those B vitamins apart. I'll look it up when I get home, and we'll give it a trial run."

"You're kinda babbling again."

"It's supposed to help your circulation, you know, warm you up a bit. Gotta keep blood pumping through those extremities," I said, then kicked my own ass all over the inside of my head.

He turned and looked at me like I'd just landed from another planet. "You did not just say that," he said, a small half-grin twitching at the corner of his mouth.

"Nuh-uh," I said, gravely. "Say what?"

"I didn't think you did."

He turned back to the sink and turned up the hot water till steam rose up around him. I carried dishes over and left them by the sink, put away the parmesan, put away the butter. When I had the table cleared, I went to the sink and dried whatever he handed me. Sometime while we were working, he started whistling. I didn't know the tune, but I was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to sound like that. Things got normal for a little while.

I knew better than to think it would last.

  
   


* * *

  
   


He took me up to his room. I expected him to say he'd shared with Steven, but in a family like Jim's, sharing wasn't actually encouraged. There were boxes all around, labeled in thick blue magic marker. The chemical ink-smell was still sharp in the air. Instant brain-fog.

Jim nodded, answering the question I hadn't asked. "Dad's been on a labeling kick. He's going through all this stuff he pulled down a few months ago, during the Reconstruction."

I'd started calling it that as a joke, because William had gone at it with plan and a purpose and nearly mangled the whole enterprise. He'd had a schedule for everything. Call Jim on Wednesday night. Take him to lunch Monday afternoons. Come over for dinner Thursday evening. He never missed an appointment, and Jim said once he figured his dad had it all written down on a calendar somewhere. One silent, brittle dinner with the Ellison clan had been more than enough for my delicate constitution; I invented a study group and made myself scarce Thursday nights. I wondered for a second how Karen had handled meeting the family, and then wondered for another second why I'd never asked.

Jim was so self-conscious about it, so nervous when he'd tell me he was going to see his dad--like I was going to begrudge my best friend time to repair one of the most important relationships of his whole life. It was just like him, and it was stuff like what his dad had done to him that made him that way, and no way was I getting in the path of setting things right.

Part of William's plan had been covering old ground. I think he wanted to prove he'd noticed stuff, even if he wasn't around for it. He had all Jim's old clothes, and his old toys--hell, he still had some of Jim's high school report cards. If pressed really hard, Naomi might be able to remember the name of my old high school, but she wouldn't understand why anybody cared. If I didn't drive by it on my way to Rainier every day, I wouldn't remember the name of it either. Maybe the past is more important if you have a bad one.

I looked down at the card in my hand and grinned. "A D in English?"

"Hey, I didn't say you could read those--" He reached for it, and I put a hand on his chest and held him off, holding the card way out to one side.

"The whole mosaic?" I said, innocent as baby.

He had reach on me; he didn't use it. He looped that arm over my shoulders and we looked at his junior-year report card together. He smelled like spaghetti and Old Spice; he smelled good.

"I remember that class," he said finally. "That was the year before I left home."

"Not a good year for you."

"No. Not the best. But there were some good things, it's just--"

"They get cloudy."

"Yeah," Jim said. "They do."

"It's funny, you know?" I looked up at him, the light from the same lamp he'd studied under for so many years glowing amber on his hair. His skin. He was so close I could've said how long since his last shave.

"What?"

"You forget the good things from your past. I mean, not like amnesia, or Peru--that was sense-weirdness, doesn't really count. I just mean--the normal, good things. You have to be reminded. Me, I forget the bad stuff. It all kind of fades away."

"Maybe the different things don't stand out enough against the background." Jim looked back down at the card I held, but I don't think he saw it.

"What about now?"

His eyes shifted back to mine. "What do you mean?"

I opened my mouth before I realized I didn't know what I meant. I closed it and shook my head, confused and sad and feeling unexpectedly unanchored. All this stuff around us, it wasn't good stuff--it was Jim's past, it was the dark background that swallowed up all the good, light things. And there wasn't anything I could do about that, there wasn't any way I could change it or brighten it or do anything but maybe be a small spark against it, if I was even that. I suddenly wasn't so sure, and that was what I wanted to ask--if I was part of the dark, or one of the transient lights. If it would even matter which I'd been, a few years down the road.

Only I couldn't ask that. I just stood there and looked at him. And he looked back at me for a long time before he turned me and fitted me against him and leaned down to touch his lips to mine.

I closed my arms around his waist and opened my mouth against his, but he moved away from it. He kissed my forehead, slow and soft and dry. I couldn't breathe without gasping. My eyes were closed, and the light against my eyelids turned the darkness red. He moved lower, kissed my cheek--clumsy, almost on my ear, and he laughed quietly over that, and pressed his forehead against mine.

"Sorry, Chief."

"I'll survive."

"I always wanted to make out in my old bedroom."

I pulled back a little. "You never did? Come on."

"We didn't really have people over."

I thought about that for one second, then reached for the back of his neck. I thought about the unspoken rule, then I thought about Karen. And then I pushed thought away.

This was Jim and me, outside of everything else. Separate. "This is deeply twisted."

"Yeah...."

I kissed him. Slow and easy, the way he seemed to want it. Into his mouth, a quick taste of him, and then I moved to his throat, settling in there, rocking into him, gentle and quiet. His arms tightened around my back and he didn't do anything, didn't move or anything, so I stopped and just soaked him in. His breath on my neck was warm and unsteady, and a light went on in a dark place in my head.

He was answering my question. Letting me be a light here, with his old bedroom for the background. Letting me put a good memory here. I don't know if he knew he was doing it, but he was, and when I knew it I also knew this wasn't going to be something he remembered a year from now, five years from now, when I wasn't living in his study and he wasn't carting me around to crime scenes, when I was teaching at a university across the country and he was maybe making Captain.

_The different things don't stand out_.

It hurt. I was taken by surprise by how much it hurt--I shouldn't have been, but I was floored by it. And that just made it worse because the different things don't stand out. Nihilistic angst. What if _I_ didn't remember?

I pulled away. His eyes were on me, all shining and happy, and I pulled away from that, too, on the inside. The brightness turned into a question and I shrugged, looking over his shoulder at the clock on the wall. "Your dad should be home soon," I said.

"He won't be home till after ten."

"Yeah, but... I don't know, Jim, it just feels weird. What if he comes home early?" I was clutching at air to find a good excuse not to touch him, and he blinked at me for a second and then, out of nowhere, he started laughing.

He fell back onto his bed. His head smacked against one of the cardboard boxes and he said, "Ow, damn it," but he was still laughing, breathless. I started to worry about his stability.

"Uh... Jim?"

"I just can't believe--" he said, and started laughing again.

"Come on, man, you're giving me the creeps."

"'What if he comes home early?'" He sat up, wheezing like an old man and hugging his chest. "I can't believe I had to wait till I was almost forty to have this conversation."

I couldn't not grin at him, and I couldn't not laugh when my grin set him off again. I shook my head and offered him my hand, pulled him upright. "I see why you don't come home much," I said, looking around the room before zeroing in on him again. "This place makes you weird."

"It's a better place than it used to be," he said, which wasn't really a response to what I'd said but was maybe another way of answering that question I hadn't quite asked.

"We should go." I waved at the posters on the wall and the model rocket on his dresser. "I feel like a perv."

He rolled his eyes and stood up, straightening his t-shirt and his jacket. "Okay. But we're only halfway through the stuff I have planned."

"Oh, God."

"You're gonna love this."

"You're gonna kill me."

"Get your coat."

  
   


* * *

  
   


We walked to Lincoln Elementary, keeping to the sidewalks, moving from one sodium-lighted circle to another. The wind cut close as a razor, cold and damp, blowing in from the north over a black wall of mountains. The street sloped gently upward, curving to the west. Houses here were few and far between, set far back from the road at the end of long, winding driveways. The higher we went, the longer the drives became. Soon, it started to feel like civilization was backing away from us.

I actually kind of like the cold, no matter what Jim thinks. Cold and wet, that bugs me. But a night like this, with a little wind and a little chill, so cold you can see your breath, hands and face freezing--I had good memories of walking like this with Naomi, years back, just before I took off for college.

She didn't want me to go. It was a little too establishment for her--_I_ was a little too establishment for her back then. Naomi Sandburg's short-haired son--carnivore, brand-label-boy, ready to sell his mind to the federal government for a few dollars and a few years' education. Kind of a scandal on the commune circuit in those days. We used to walk for hours, hashing it out, trying to make sense of each other. I didn't always get the anarchy and she never understood the system, but she signed all the right papers and let me do what I needed to do. Good times.

Jim probably always walked this road alone. The thought made me edge a little closer to him, crowd him a little; he looked over at me, eyebrows at half-mast, and crowded me back. We walked shoulder to shoulder for a while, or as close as we could come to that. I wanted to bring him into my world a little, like there was a circle around me and if I could just get him into it, everything bad in his past would go away. Like maybe I could contaminate him with some of the good-family feelings I had. Stupid, grade-school magic--but that's where we were heading.

The sidewalk opened up into a small, landscaped courtyard. The school was a chrome and glass temple to the purchase of learning, a private facility with carefully trimmed grass and carefully trimmed trees and carefully smooth brick walkways. There was a tall chain-link fence, bright and new and ugly, with a spiral of sharp wire hooked along the top. Jim shook his head and looked over at me, his mouth twisted. "Even here," he said, eyes going back to the fence.

"Everywhere, man."

"Tell me something I don't know."

Jim had a key to the padlocked gate; he's kind of a Boy Scout, always prepared. I followed him through, and waited while he locked up behind us.

I started off toward the front doors, hands shoved deep in my pockets for warmth. Jim caught up, and hooked my elbow with one hand.

"This way," he said, pointing off to the left. "That's just the school."

I shrugged, and followed him off into the shadows. We weren't in complete darkness for long. Jim turned a corner and vanished, and I turned right after him, and we were crossing a dimly-lit basketball court. This was a playground--one net, lower than regulation. Jim threw a grin back at me and crossed the concrete. We kept walking.

Around another corner. This time we hit paydirt. The lights were brighter here, glaring down on a striped field, uprights towering at either end. Jim walked out onto the grass, sinking into it. I followed. My sneakers were soaked three steps in, my socks damp and cold. _Dew_, I thought, surprised. Then, with disgust: _City boy_. An elementary school football field was the closest I'd been to nature in about three months. Suddenly, intensely, I felt like camping.

I stopped before I got to the middle of the field, and just watched Jim. He kept walking, out to the center and then left, toward the net behind the goal. Beyond the net, there was a small strip of grass--and beyond that, the tree-line.

Jim stopped on that strip of grass, and turned back to me.

"You coming?" he called. His voice was clear and loud, but kind of muffled; there was a mist moving in, a finger of the marine layer spreading inland as the ground let go of its heat.

I held up my hands. "Coming where?" I shouted back. But I went anyway, jogging to catch up with him, my head throbbing a little but not so much I couldn't handle it. I ended up at his side, out of breath, at the mouth of a path that led into the stand of trees. The light didn't penetrate far into the woods, but it didn't have to; I knew where I was, knew it with a dark clarity that pushed all the air out of my lungs.

"Oh, man. Jim...."

"It's okay, Sandburg."

"You don't have to do this. I get it, okay? All of it, the whole night, I get it."

Jim's smile just got wider. "Happy birthday, Sandburg," he said, blowing all the birthday rules to hell. Then he fished a small flashlight out of his pocket and flicked a switch, throwing a pool of yellow light onto the path. "Come on."

Jim leading, me half a footstep behind, we set out on the trail that led to the site of Bud Hadish's murder.

  
   


* * *

  
   


I was lost almost instantly. At night, every tree looks just like every other. To me, anyway--I don't know if Jim's direction sense came from being a sentinel or being a Ranger, but I was ridiculously glad he had it, whatever the source. He was surefooted ahead of me, stepping easily over the faint trail, not making a sound. I followed as quietly as I could, not out of fear of being heard or anything--just kind of picking up on the silence. It was a ritual thing, I understood that now--the whole night, one end to the other.

He stopped. The patch of ground underneath us looked like the patches of ground all around us and all the ones behind us on the path. Jim knelt down, ran his fingers through dead leaves and dirt, then lifted his hand and breathed the scent in deep. His eyes were closed, his face tilted up toward the sky. He was pale as a pillar of salt in all that silver moonlight, blotched dark where the wind moved shadows over his skin.

"Right here," he said. When he opened his eyes to look at me, they picked up the moonlight. Eerie, reflective--it took me a minute to notice they were wet.

I sucked in a breath, biting back a sound that would've smashed my control to pieces. My throat ached, my eyes, every breath I took seemed to burn. It was such a bad idea for us to be here, such a horrible wrong thing for us to be doing, standing together in this place. I'd wanted to know Jim, wanted it all, and now all I wanted was for him to somehow take it back. There was too much of him now, too much in the air around us and way too much inside of me. I couldn't breathe, couldn't talk, couldn't remember where my walls were. I didn't want to know any more.

"I was ten," he said. "I found him here, and all I could think for a second was that he'd been eating a hamburger and he somehow got ketchup all over himself. Crazy, huh? He was bleeding from the jugular and I thought he'd had a messy dinner."

"It was outside your realm of experience then, Jim. You were just a kid. You didn't know what death looked like."

He nodded. Eyes fixed on mine. "I learned pretty fast, though. Didn't take me long to figure it out. When I did, I was just numb. Scared, sad, but it just all seemed a long way away."

"Don't put yourself through this," I said, meaning, _don't put me through this, please_. But the genie was out of the bottle, and Jim's voice went on, painting gory pictures in the dark.

"This is where I lost it all for the first time. Everything shut down. Felt like I was wrapped in cotton, my whole damn world was gray on gray for days."

"No color at all?"

His eyes focused on me suddenly, the fuzzy, distant look tightening to a single sharp point. "Not for a while."

"And the others...?"

"I couldn't smell a turd if you shoved it under my nose. I could hear okay, but nothing like what I was used to. At the time, I don't know--I thought, maybe Bud was the one who made me different, and when he died, he took it all with him."

"In a way, that was true," I said. "I think--I mean, there's no real way for us to know, but he did encourage you to use your senses, right? Maybe... maybe Bud was your spiritual guide for a while, like Incacha was."

"Like you are."

I nodded, looking up at the moon, not really seeing it. Thoughts were intersecting in my head, patterns forming. Bud in Cascade, Incacha in Peru--senses heightened only when there was help to be had, probably some kind of primitive survival instinct. I was resolving not to take any long vacations without him in the future when he said something else that put my brain into neutral.

"Guess I'm three for three."

"Hello." I waved a hand in front of him. "See Blair. See Blair breathing. Gooood Blair."

"I remember when you couldn't."

"Just stop it." I stepped in front of him, pulled him up to his feet. I wanted to shake him, but he was too fragile and I was too mad. "I'm not taking this trip with you again." The words echoed in my head until I remembered him saying something like that, back in the hospital.

"You gotta admit, Sandburg, I don't have the best track record with partners."

"Yeah, and I suck at minigolf," I snapped. "We're talking a remarkably similar level of significance. You've had bad luck, Jim, but that bad luck doesn't define you as a person, okay? Bad shit happens and it doesn't happen because of you. It just happens to you."

He shrugged and took a step away from me. Cold air flowed between us; I shivered, and pulled my jacket close around me. He didn't say anything else, just stood there looking into the trees. There were words for the moment, I knew, but the night just got quieter around us while we didn't say any of them.

So many things hurt him. I knew him, even before tonight I could always be sure I knew him, but there were times I'd find a place so raw and dangerous in his head I just had to slap a Band-Aid on it and try really hard not to scratch. This whole birthday thing was starting to look less like forgiving me for indiscretions in the pursuit of scientific accuracy and more like ripping open some ugly scabs.

_Welcome to the real world, Blair Sandburg. That place where things are occasionally not about you_.

I went to him and pulled him around to face me. Blank and calm, he'd totally recovered his cool. There was a look in his eyes like he was a million miles away and accelerating.

"What exactly are you doing here, Jim, huh?" I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and hunched my shoulders, trying to conserve some warmth. "You trying to say goodbye to me, or trying to ask me to stay?"

Jim's eyes widened, and for a second he really saw me. There was a single moment when I could tell I'd said the right thing, I'd touched something important. Just a single breath of time, and then it was gone, his eyes were blank and cold again, and I'd lost him.

"That's kind of melodramatic," he said. "Even for you."

"I get it. Nobody sticks around. They die or get killed or get mad and go away and you're left standing there wondering what you did. And then after a while when you can't figure out what that was, you start making stuff up, and what you come up with is, Jim Ellison's a curse, everybody who gives a damn about him dies. Am I on the right track so far?"

"You're not even on the right train, Sandburg."

"It figures, you know, because it must've started with your mom. That's why we had to go to the house, right? That was where little Jimmy bought his first clue."

He reached out and took hold of my arm, right below the shoulder, and for a second I thought he was gonna hit me. His eyes were that bright and crazy, the shape of his mouth that wrong. A sound came out of him, low and desperate, but he didn't actually say anything, didn't actually form any words. I watched him long enough to be sure, then took my hand out of my pocket and took his arm like he had mine--closing the perfect circuit.

"I'm only going to say this once, and I want you to listen, okay?" I pulled him closer and looked up into his face, felt his breath on my lips, inhaled it. I gave him all the feeling I had in me; all the fear and trust and friendship I could put into my voice, I put there. "I'm not going to die on you. I'm not going to get killed. I may get mad, but I'm sure as hell not going away. I'm here for the duration, Jim, okay?"

"You can't promise that," he said, shaking his head. His voice was rough, deep and hoarse and fearful.

"I can."

"Something could happen. Any day, something could happen."

"Nothing's going to."

"You can't promise that," he said again, and I hated the despair in his voice, hated everybody who put it there. I put my arms around him in the dark in the place where his first friend died and willed all the heat in me to make him warm.

"I can promise," I said around the pain in my throat. "I can promise, and I do promise."

"That's stupid," he said, his voice muffled in my hair.

"I know."

"What, you're Nostradamus now?"

"I'm a very smart guy."

"You really mean it," he said, low and soft and... sweet, kind of eager and young and brittle. "But... Blair, the paper."

"The paper doesn't mean shit, Jim. I'm almost done. Don't worry about the paper."

"I have to."

"You don't. You really don't." I squeezed him tighter, promised him again silently. Promised him again out loud. "Lots of people go away, Jim, but I'm not one of them. You're my best friend, and thirty years from now when you call me up to baby-sit your grandkids I'm gonna remind you of this conversation and laugh my ass off 'cause you didn't believe me at first. Okay?"

His arms, tight and solid around me, went slack.

"I have grandkids in the future?"

"Thirty-seven of 'em. Saw it in my crystal ball."

"What about you?"

"Permanent bachelorhood. The chicks don't usually go for a guy who lives in his best friend's attic."

His arms dropped; he took a step back. The silver light in his eyes was fading as the moon took a dive behind the trees; we were losing the light fast, and his flashlight flickered dimly over the floor of the clearing.

"Is that what you see for yourself?"

I shrugged awkwardly, the cold sinking into the places he'd been keeping warm for me. "I don't see what we have ever changing, if that's what you're asking me, Jim. I don't see us losing what we are."

It was as honest as I could be. It was as warm as I could be, standing there in the dark and chill and watching him slip away from me. I wanted to be right with every molecule in my body, I wanted to be his Nostradamus, his oracle. Wanted everything I'd said to be carved in stone, so no future stupid acts could ever erase it.

But he was gone already. Right in front of me, already MIA. "Time to go, Sandburg."

My heart kicked once and started racing. That cold note was back, and there I was, another wrong turn in Ellisonville and me without a map. "Hey, not that it won't be worth it. I see many great attics in your future, too."

"Thanks."

"Excellent houses, excellent attics."

"Right."

"Right." Wrong, again and still, the warm between us evaporated, every damn thing I'd done to make things right a waste of my time and breath. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Yeah, but are you okay?"

"No, doc, I have this severe pain in my ass...."

"Jim, come on, what did I say wrong?"

He looked at me and shook his head, a smile on his lips, small and twisted. "You said everything right." He put his hand on my neck, so that I could feel the cool of his palms pressing into the warmth under my hair.

"No! Something's wrong here, God damn it, why won't you just tell me? Why won't you just say whatever it is so I can fix it?" I raised both hands and they were balled into fists so I hit him, I hit him hard in the chest and he caught me by the wrists and held me with no effort at all, held me back and away from him. Held me at a distance.

"You're my best friend," he said.

"I keep hurting you, I keep fucking things up. I don't know what to--"

"You haven't hurt me."

"You're in pain, don't fucking lie to me, Jim, I'm not an idiot! Every time I open my mouth--"

"You haven't hurt me," he said again, and he put his mouth on mine, opened, sucked me in, and I hit the flashpoint. I wanted him to stop hurting but I couldn't have that, so I just wanted him, wanted what I could have, wanted it so bad I couldn't do anything but let him have me, touch any place he wanted, and he wanted, God, he wanted....

"Last time," he said, and I thought _it's not the last time, it's not, it's not, there never will be a last time_.

"Jim...." His mouth was against my neck, his hands at the button on my jeans.

"Yeah," he said, and bit me where my neck turned into shoulder and I snapped, my mind wasn't there, just my body, and my heart. His hands were like ice and they were everywhere, everything he did to me in that place burned like fire and everything he did hurt like a knife slicing through my skin and everything he did to me I asked him to do to me, begged him, until we were on the ground, in the cold dirt, going off like rockets.

When it was over the moon was gone, the silver was off the branches of the trees and everything was dark. I was still hard, still hurting, and I didn't look at him. I wanted him again, but even more, I wanted him _different_. Wanted him to find a peace I couldn't give him.

So I sat up and dusted myself off, buttoned my jeans as best I could. Stood up, and then I could turn and look at him.

He was standing, a dark Jimshadow beside me, barely distinguishable from the trees. Just as well; he had roots here too, just like they did.

"Are you ready?" he said. "We're losing the light."

I nodded, and followed him along the path, stepping in his footsteps. The way out seemed faster than the way in, but of course it was the same path, we came out in the same place. The lights on the field seemed brighter after the black of the woods, and when I looked at Jim, he looked brighter, too.

"What next?" I asked, holding my breath for the answer.

"Home." He started across the field.

"Your dad's place?"

He stopped and turned back. "_Home_, home," he said, tapping the face of his watch.

I looked at mine, flicking the little Indiglo switch that lit up all the numbers.

It was five past midnight. My birthday--and my week's grace period--were now officially over.

  
   


* * *

  
   


There was a message on the machine when we got home. I hit play, listened to the tape spool back while I pulled a couple of beers out of the fridge. Jim threw his jacket at the rack of hooks by the door and headed upstairs without missing a step. I put one of the bottles back.

_Home sweet home_.

I think I actually remembered before I heard her voice. I must have, because I tensed up and looked over at the machine before she ever said a word. She didn't really have to say a word because it was all there in my mind already and I thought, _I'm a sleaze. I oughta run for office_.

Alexandria.

I called her from the line in my room. I didn't even slow down to turn on the light. Fifteen rings later she picked up and I took my first breath since dialing.

I didn't get to say hello.

"Hi," she said. "Alexandria doesn't live here anymore. She was kidnapped from Brandt's and sold into white slavery when her date failed to show up on his own God damn birthday!"

"Zan, I'm sorry. I'm really, really, really sorry."

"You better be sorry, I waited an hour for you before I finally ate and by the way, you owe me thirty bucks for dinner."

"_Thirty?_"

"There was a cake, Blair. There were presents. Do they not have birthdays where you come from? Were you raised in some bizarro alternate universe where birthdays have been outlawed?"

"Not... that I'm aware of, no."

"Jeez, Blair. I waited."

I sat down on my bed, my legs crossed under me, and tucked the phone between my shoulder and my ear. That left my hands free to cover my face, which I'd be forced to do for the rest of my life if there were any justice in the world.

"I'm sorry."

"What happened to you? Did you get called in to the police station or something?"

"...something like that," I said. And then, because if I hated myself any more I'd have to start devolving, "No, not really."

"Then what?"

"Zan... Jim and I have this thing about birthdays. For the past couple of years, we've kind of been spending them together."

"Oh, I see, and your lips got accidentally sewn together so you couldn't tell me this."

"I didn't think we'd be doing anything this time. He's been busy, and it just didn't occur to me that we'd do anything, and then I got knocked around a little on this case and he says, 'Let's go, Sandburg,' so I hop in the truck and the next thing I know we're on the way to his dad's house for dinner. What was I gonna say? I couldn't get out of it, Zan, honest. And I had an injury," I finished. "I was bleeding from the head."

"Answer me one thing, Blair, and I'll forgive you everything."

"I'm listening."

"Jim's dad," she said. "Does he have a phone?"

I was nailed. And it wasn't even unexpected, it was totally fair--I'd been a jerk. Should've called her. Hell, should've remembered her.

"I'm sorry," I said again. "I was wired and I was in pain and Jim took me by surprise, and I just forgot. I'm an ass."

"Yeah, you are."

"You should probably hit me or something," I said. "I'm bad for you."

"Yeah, well, you're a guy. That's a given. Look, Blair, I think it's sweet that you and your roommate have a tradition, okay? I'm a traditional girl. But I've got this tradition of my own, passed down to me from my mother and her mother before her: we don't date guys who don't show up. Okay?"

"Okay," I said.

"Happy birthday, Blair."

"I'm sorry."

"Give me a week to cool down. I've got a ton of bluebooks to grade anyway. I'm just mad, okay?"

"I know." I leaned back against my pillows. "I'm mad at me, too."

"Good." A few seconds of quiet, and then she sighed. "I told Doctor Harvey you'd cover my ten o'clock tomorrow. I'm going to the dentist."

"Got your back."

"Happy birthday."

"You said that."

"Yeah," she said. "Well, that time I meant it."

I hung up and tossed the phone to the foot of my bed. I felt like throwing it.

I closed my eyes, shut down my brain, and tried to relax. I was on the edge of falling asleep with all my clothes on when Jim said, "Couldn't get out of it, chief?"

I turned my head on the pillow. "Don't you fucking start with me."

His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders hunched in on themselves like he was cold. He shrugged, and looked around the room, avoiding my eyes. "I didn't know you had plans." The words were absolutely clear, soft and measured.

"I should have called her."

Jim bowed his head and scratched at the back of his neck. When he looked up, he looked right into me. "You really forgot?"

I sat up, leaned my elbows on my knees, and looked at him with new eyes. "You surprised me, Jim," I said, choosing my words carefully. "You looked so pleased with yourself, I didn't even think. Whatever you had going on... I just wanted in on it."

Jim had turned out the lights in the living room, but the kitchen overhead slanted in through my doorway and made a long Ellison-shaped shadow across my floor. He took a step closer, and for a second I thought he was going to come to me, walk right over and be there with me in my own bed. I wanted it; we were flying blind now, out in the darkness. A sweat broke out on my back and my face and I started to say something but he stopped moving, stood still as a statue, if statues shivered like that.

I sucked in a breath, forced out a word. "What?"

"I'll screw it up."

"You won't."

He looked away from me. His hands were clasped behind his back; there was something military in it, not exactly attention, but something formal.

"I'm not seeing Karen anymore."

Between one minute and the next, the world turned into a different place. There was a moment there when I wasn't sure I'd heard him right, when I thought the writing and the stress and the, well, writing, had pushed me right over the edge. I felt warm, flushed--excited, like I'd tasted ozone and now I could feel the storm coming on.

"Jim--man, I don't get it."

He shrugged. "Plans change. I couldn't... pretend, like that. Wasn't good for me, wasn't good for her. I just thought you should know."

"You were going to have babies, if I recall correctly. I was gonna live in your attic."

"It had mice, anyway."

"You really broke things off with her?"

"Yeah." He took a breath, and let it out on a sigh. "This afternoon. That's why I was late."

"But you--everything was good. You said you wanted to tell her. I heard you on the phone with her just last week and you were making that stupid voice."

Jim's eyebrows came together. "What stupid voice?"

"Never mind. Just, wow."

He sighed. "She was pretty surprised, too." And he touched his own wrist for a second, and moved it through a slow, painful arc.

I looked at him and frowned, and looked harder, and closer, because even though it was dark and I could barely see him, I would've sworn he was blushing.

"Ah, Jim."

"She caught me off guard."

"She _hit_ you?"

"No! For Christ's sake, Sandburg. She kind of--shoved at me, a little, and I was off balance already, and I went down."

"You might want to think about sometimes just taking it on the butt, Jim. You're gonna wreck that wrist some day."

"I'm sorry I ever opened my mouth."

"I just bet you are."

I smiled at him, so he'd know I was kidding. There was a question I wanted to ask that I knew I couldn't ask, not yet, not with everything so crazy and raw between us. So I didn't say anything, just looked at him, and after a second he smiled back, wide and clear.

"So, you're okay," I said, meaning, _you're not gonna cry or anything, right?_ "You need me to wrap that for you?"

"I'm fine."

"I thought you were really gonna tell her."

"I know," he said. Not smiling anymore, just watching me, still and open. "Now I'm not."

"I thought--"

"I just thought you should know," he said again. "I just got you in trouble with your girlfriend. I feel like I should apologize, or something, but--"

"But you didn't do anything."

"I was going to say, 'but I'm kind of flattered.'" His face was red, but he was a tough guy, he held my eyes anyway.

"You know, I don't fuck up my romantic life for just anybody, Ellison."

He nodded slowly. I reached out to him, reached for his hand, and he gave it to me. I studied his face, his eyes, the strange and tentative twist of his smile, and it seemed like maybe he was getting it. Just for a second, a tiny breakthrough--what I'd been trying to say to him all night long. _You're important, you're worthy, you matter, Jim. Okay? Have a clue, on me. I care._

I knew the whole revelation thing on my birthday was meant to tell me something. And I knew I missed it completely, I knew I'd fucked it up on some level outside my comprehension. Maybe I didn't know what the words meant, but I'd taken linguistics courses in the distant past and I recognized them as language.

I looked at him with new eyes, and all at once, superimposed over the friend I'd always known, I could see those cracks in the sidewalk outside my grandmother's house ten years ago, with the roots of an old oak tree buckling up the concrete. Growth demands change, that's what she'd said when I asked her about getting it fixed, and there was just something in that image that touched me, stuck with me--nature, life, overcoming the walls set around it.

Things grow and they take up more space, and maybe it's a tree breaking up a sidewalk or maybe it's a kid busting out of his cousin's hand-me-down Levi's, or maybe it's a feeling that breaks out of the space you made for it, out of the comfortable box you put it in, and rearranges your life to its new, inevitable parameters. I looked at Jim Ellison standing in front of me, eyes so dark and shadowed, and the feelings I used to understand were so vastly changed I barely even recognized them.

I didn't just like this man, I didn't just care about him, because those words weren't big enough anymore. I didn't just love him because I'd loved him all along, and that was a part of this but separate from it, too, in some way I hoped I'd never have to define. I looked at him and I knew that what was happening to me had happened to him, too--had maybe happened a long time ago--and now there was this new kind of quiet between us, this new thing growing out of the old stuff so slow and secret I hadn't even noticed it. Jim's hand in mine was warm, hot, slick with nervous sweat, and I felt a sudden kinship with that concrete sidewalk, felt the places between Jim and me where the cracks would grow if we didn't find a way to bend around what was happening between us.

Growth demands change.

"Jim," I said. And before I knew what I was going to say next, "Come out with me tomorrow night. I want to show you something."

"Okay." He nodded--a little slow, but definite. He didn't ask any questions, and that meant I was right--I had to be right about this because it was the biggest thing ever in my life.

"Okay."

"So," and he actually was smiling, his voice had that soft sound to it that made my chest feel strange, "So. Want to have a beer?"

In the half-light he looked like something out of one of my better dreams--solid, gold and dark, not quite one thing or the other. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up. His eyes on me felt good and so, so very familiar. I was getting used to it, getting fond of it. He didn't move, and I had to brush past him on the way through to the kitchen. I felt the heat of him on my skin, and that was familiar, too.

_Home sweet psychotic home_.

**V.**

Zan left lecture notes in the box outside her office. I took them to her class and I must have used them because the class lasted nearly the full hour and nobody looked at me funny. Not any more than students ever did, anyway. I gave them their assignment, dismissed them, and forgot them. I had stuff to do.

I had _not-writing_ to do.

Sometimes--if you're lucky in life and you do things the way you're supposed to, if you cross all your t's and dot all your i's and never forget your mom's birthday--sometimes you're gifted by the gods or fate or karma with a moment of perfect, diamond-sharp clarity that changes everything. You can see it in your mind, the whole wreck of your life so far, leading up to this single point where the road straightens out and goes just where you want it to.

It came when I was shaving before taking off for class. I cut myself, and bled a little, and thought _hey, there's my lifeblood spilling out into the sink, one inch to the side and I'd never have to finish the fucking paper, ha ha._ And as I thought that, another thought crept out of the middle of that, a really amazingly brilliant one that had been escaping me for months.

_I hate that thing, I don't want to finish that thing, that thing_ sucks.

I looked up at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror, half shaven, half foamed, with my hair pulled back off-center to keep it out of the water. Steam rose up around me, in front of me, and hazed over the glass and I wasn't sure I knew the guy I was looking at. He wasn't the writing guy, really, and the writing guy was the only guy I knew, so this guy was a stranger.

While I was putting a tiny piece of white toilet paper over the not-so-tiny bleeding gash on my face, I thought some more.

What I thought, mainly, was that I was two pages from the end of chapter six of the utter destruction of my life. And that maybe, possibly, that was a little too close.

At eleven I locked myself in my office, ignoring the dirty look Tracy automatically gave anybody who dared shut his office doors when there were students around. I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and set it on my desk, shoving aside a pile of notes and a stack of diskettes that fell over and scattered onto the floor. And then I turned it on and hooked it up to the printer and printed.

I printed the whole damn thing, right up to where I left off in mid-sentence halfway down page 198. It took a long time.

When the printing was done I put the whole thing in a small lockbox and closed it. I felt like I'd managed to cage something dangerous, something poisonous, and I felt like I'd maybe saved my life in the process. There was a lightness in my chest that clashed with the raving fear clawing at me every time I thought more than five minutes into the future.

I was out in the danger zone now, out past everything I knew. I looked at my hands, which weren't any different than they ever were--just a little more still now, and maybe a little more empty. Colder, too, because the heat was on the fritz. If I held Jim's hand in mine now, I wasn't sure I'd be able to tell the difference.

At three I gave up on pretending to be the perfect grad student. I shut everything down, packed everything up, and carried the box of paper downstairs, to the parking lot. My backpack got tossed in the rear passenger seat; the box sat in the front, right beside me. A tiny sarcastic part of me thought seriously about buckling that baby in. I'd been six months in labor.

At home, I dug some clothes out of my closet--a t-shirt; a green sweater that was a little long at the waist and sleeve, a little ragged, comfort-wear; a clean pair of jeans--and took them all into the bathroom. Looking in the mirror this time, I made more sense to myself. Nothing got in the way.

It took me fifteen minutes to shower, and Jim came home sometime in the middle of it. He knocked on the bathroom door to let me know he was home. Panic set in hard then; there was this thin, quiet tremor running through the center of every bone I had. The water poured down over me, hot, washing the soap away. The steady drumming of it should've been relaxing.

It wasn't.

I turned off the tap, dried off, and pulled my clothes on with a sense of surreal precision. Every movement seemed to mean a very great deal. I pushed the sleeves of the sweater up to my elbows, took a last look at new and improved Blair Sandburg, and went out to say hello.

Jim sat at the kitchen table, a book in one hand and a sandwich in the other. I couldn't see the title, but he was absorbed in it and he was over halfway through. Watching him gave me a chance to get myself together, figure out what I was going to say. I tried out about a hundred lines in the time it took me to walk up behind him, but when I put my hand on his shoulder, when he turned his face up to me and smiled, nothing seemed to fit.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"I'm here."

I swallowed. "Yeah. Ready to go?"

Jim pushed back his chair and stood up. There was a stillness in him, solid and calm, unapproachable. He wore a cream-colored sweater over loose gray slacks, with his hands casually tucked into the pockets. The last light of afternoon hit him sideways and did interesting, shadowy things to the planes of his face.

"Where are we going?"

Shaking on the inside, my pulse as erratic as my thought processes, I couldn't answer. I couldn't think of any way to start.

"Where are we going, Sandburg?"

_Where_ are _we going, Jim?_

I took a deep breath, stepped back, and waved a hand in the direction of my door. "A little place I know."

  
   


* * *

  
   


For a while I'd given serious thought to taking us someplace different. My grandmother's house was still standing, and it crossed my mind to take him there, but somebody else was living in it now. And it wasn't the same, really, wouldn't be the same, because it wasn't the kind of place Jim had taken me. He'd taken me to the place where he'd become the guy he was today, and he'd shown me the things that did that to him, that made Jim Ellison the guy I knew so well.

I could do that for him, too. But for me to do that, we had to stay at home.

I led Jim by the hand into my bedroom, and stopped us just inside the door. He looked around, taking in everything. I hadn't cleaned up in his honor; he wasn't a guest here. I was opening myself up, just like he had, and everything really needed to be real.

I took his hand and held it tightly in mine. I wasn't letting go for anything short of nuclear detonation. "Here we are."

His eyebrows went up. "This is your room, Sandburg."

"That's kind of the point."

"Guided tour of the bathroom next? A quick spin around the kitchen?"

"I wanted to show you the place where I grew up."

His smile faded. Stillness washed back over him, but there was an edge to it now. A fragile kind of waiting.

"Jim... I don't really know for sure what you were trying to say to me last night. I just know it felt important, and it felt... good. For the most part."

"What is this, Sandburg?"

"Listen to me, for a second?"

"You've got my attention."

I watched him, waited, and when he just watched me back I took a breath and laid the hand he wasn't holding on top of the box. "Surprise."

He looked at it. His head tilted to one side, and he looked, and looked, and the way he was looking was so intense he could probably read the paper right through the metal; it wasn't lead-lined. When he turned that look on me, his eyes were wide and startled--and confused.

"The paper's in the box." Letting go of him, I unlocked it and flipped up the lid. "Voilá."

He looked away from it, back to me. It was darker in here, and his face was pale without the sun to give it color. I stepped away to turn on the lamp on my nightstand; it brought him marginally closer to the land of the living.

"Jim?"

"You're done?"

"As done as I plan to get, yeah."

Sharp-eyed, unfriendly, he glared at me. "What the hell does that mean?"

"It means--I'm done. Stick a fork in me. It's 198 pages, and it's not finished, but I'm done. I just--I get it now, you know? I know what the problem is."

"Why don't you tell me."

"I know you hate this thing, Jim. Every time I work on it you go ballistic, and I understand that, totally. Your secret revealed for all the world to see--geez, Jim. It's completely natural. I mean, like Peter Parker would let some geek publish a paper about his Spidey sense, you know?"

"There is a problem here." He looked around the room, shaking his head. "What is it with this whole comic book analogy you have going? Is that what all this is to you? I'm Batman and you're Robin, is that it?"

"I'm just saying I doubt Batman would've wanted Robin to stick around, either, if Robin was planning to reveal his secret identity to the world. And who could blame him?"

His eyes narrowed and his face twisted up, in that way he had of looking like the person he was talking to had escaped from a mental facility. "You're--I don't even know why I talk to you, you know that? Do you have any data in that thing on why I keep trying to have conversations with you?"

There was a hard lump in my throat, an aching place that choked me when I tried to talk around it. "What am I doing wrong?"

"If you don't know, I don't think I can tell you."

"Try. Come on, man, that's what this is all about. Last night you showed me some things about you, you told me some things. It felt like you were trying to tell me who you are, and I just wanted--I just want--to do that for you, too. To give that to you."

"That's just great, Sandburg. That's perfect. This is who you are? This paper, this stupid pile of pulp and words, that's who you are? Fuck that. How the hell can you tell me who you are when you don't even know yourself?"

"Hey." I took a step closer. "I know exactly who I am."

"You think this is about the dissertation."

"Okay, you tell me, Jim. What is it about? Because I obviously haven't got a clue."

"What planet have you been living on for the past few months?"

"Gee, I don't know, maybe, Planet Jim Doesn't Talk To Me and I'm Not a Fucking Psychic? If it's not about the paper, what the hell is it about?"

"It's about you and me. Us. You know, two people, living together, having sex, watching movies, getting our laundry mixed up. I've got four of your shirts in my closet and they don't fit and I keep them there anyway, what does that say to you?"

I blinked. Startled, sidetracked. "It says you stole four of my shirts."

"This conversation is over."

"No way." I grabbed his arm as he tried to turn, forced him back around to look at me. "You said we were the paper. You said we could only last until April. It was always about that, from the very beginning."

"Yeah, for you."

"Excuse me? What the hell?"

"You, you--conflated things. I'm your sentinel, I'm your best friend, I'm your holy grail. What was I supposed to think? It's all wrapped up in one neat little package in your head, Sandburg. Well, great, just great. The paper's done, the whole thing is done, congratulations."

"Is that what you want, Jim?" I looked up right into his eyes and I think--maybe I was looking for something I didn't believe in, I don't know. I looked and it was hard for me to breathe, and hard for me to talk, but I had to ask it anyway. "You asked me once, and I told you. What do you want?"

"Why do you care?"

"I have this paper here." I touched the box, ran my fingers over the lid. "It's good. I don't--I didn't have much real data, so most of it I had to fudge, but it's an accurate representation of reality. Ethically... it's definitely on the fuzzy side. But it's good, and Jim, I could write my own ticket with it, okay?

"Then write it, Sandburg. I don't care what you do with it."

"I publish this thing, I lose you. You think I don't know that?"

"I didn't say that. When did I ever say that?"

"Jesus, Jim. When didn't you?"

He turned away, his head bowed, and braced his arms on either side of the door frame. His sweater stretched tight over knotted shoulders; I could hear his breathing, feel the tension icing over the space between us. I could have closed the distance between us with a single step, but that was just the physical distance. It didn't touch the distance inside.

That took words. And words had never worked for us.

_Break the rules, break the silence_.

Then again, silence didn't work so great, either.

_Break the silence, break the spell_.

"I love you, Jim."

His breath caught, and every part of him got tense. For a second I thought I'd lost him; I thought he was gonna make a run for it. I took that one step closer so he couldn't make any sudden moves, and then I said it again, "I love you"--better this time, I thought, louder, with a little more conviction.

"I know, Sandburg." The words came out tight, utterly controlled. "I'm your best friend, too. You've only said it about a million times."

"I'm gonna keep saying it until you hear it the way I mean it."

Jim shoved off the door and turned to look at me, and even looking straight into his eyes, I could feel him slipping out of my reach. God, it scared me when he did that, he could just tune me out like he was changing a channel and I remembered with perfect clarity all the times he'd done it. Nothing I could say ever stopped that process in the past.

But today, I had new words.

I took his face in my hands and held it, made him stay with me. His eyes were so cold I knew they had to be lying.

"Okay. Okay, listen to me this last time, Jim, and for once just hear the words as I say them, okay? Don't put the worst possible spin on this, don't assume anything, just--don't. Okay?"

"It's just that I love you so fucking much, Jim," I said. "I'm sorry it took me so long. Don't let me fuck this up. I don't know what you need me to say, I never have. I need you to... help me, here." I dropped my hands and hugged myself, but it didn't make me feel any warmer. "Please."

"Jesus," he said again. He looked away from me and my stomach dropped through the floor; he took a step back and there was ice forming along my spinal cord, I swear to God. I felt the corner then, felt him getting ready to turn it without me and all I could think was that it was over, we were over, and I'd failed the guy I was four years ago, there wasn't a single thing he'd wanted that I would ever have. I didn't know anything about the guy I'd be a year down the road from this, but it was a pretty solid bet he'd hate the guy I was right now.

I closed my eyes and started the process. Cold and dark inside, shoring myself up, trying to put together the last shreds of my dignity and make this something not ugly, not sordid. Something we could both look back on with--well, not pride, not exactly, but a sense of peace. The knowledge we'd done our best for each other at the end.

And then he was there. His hands were on my face, and I opened my eyes to find his just inches away.

"I gotta tell you, Sandburg." He was still strung tight but there was a heat coming off him now. "I'm getting pretty sick of gluing you back together every time you fuck up your romantic life."

I nodded, and stopped breathing. "I know."

"There's a limit."

I nodded again, fast. "I know, man."

"Still," and he leaned down a little, I could feel his breath on my mouth, "I guess you maybe have a little credit left in that department."

"Jim." I wasn't quite steady and not really licensed to drive a decent metaphor under the circumstances. "Jim, man, you're gonna have to tell me what that means."

"It means... I know what the problem is." He put his forehead against mine and slid his hands around to the back of my neck and I had to brace myself by grabbing his shoulders, it was purely a matter of physics. My heart went into hyperdrive and my mouth was flooded with this sharp, anticipatory wash of adrenaline. He was warm everywhere, everywhere, God, how could I ever have thought this man was cold?

"What's the problem?"

"I love you," he said. "And you--you're really not as smart as I used to think you were."

I laughed, hoarse from keeping myself from saying about a million things I shouldn't. "I was distracted."

"You were kind of a moron, Sandburg."

"You really mean it."

"Not in a bad way."

I shoved at his arm. "The other part. Geez."

"I thought you had it all together. I thought you were saying friendship was all you were ever going to want between us."

"I'm pretty sure I'm the guy who spilled his guts to you on a fairly regular basis over the past few months."

"Look. That obviously didn't mean what I thought it meant," Jim said.

"No shit."

"A lot of things didn't mean what I thought they meant."

"I call that an incredibly thoughtful and incisive interpretation of the source material."

"A lot of things didn't mean what you thought they meant, too."

"And the brilliance just keeps coming."

"You don't sound like a guy who's planning to kiss me any time soon. How's that interpretation of the source?"

"Pitiful," I said. "I plan to kiss you so deep your dad's gonna need a cigarette."

And then I did it, and he was laughing so hard he made it simple, all open and wet and easy to access even if his teeth did keep getting in my way.

  
   


* * *

  
   


I took him to my bed. That was the first difference. I walked backward and pulled him along with me; he kept his eyes on mine, and he was smiling. That was different, too.

Three years ago it had been a moment of mutual need and comfort, something rash and quiet. Hidden, even from each other. The dark of his room and the silver-blue light that filtered up through the balcony windows had iced him over and covered him in shadow. He'd never said a word, that first time. I thought we'd talk about it later, we could do what we did and deal with the fallout later.

We didn't talk about it. Not talking got to be a habit.

This, though. This Jim was blue and gold. The light from my bedside table didn't reach far, but it seemed to like him. I couldn't see him the way I used to, not anymore.

This wasn't what it used to be. This--this thing, happening now, it was considered.

We undressed together, facing each other, watching every move. Jim took care with our clothes, folding them and setting them on the table by the bed. It was so him--so respectful and kind and stupid all at the same time--that I couldn't help but grin at him, and then reach for him try to do everything else I'd ever wanted.

He put his hands on my wrists and stopped me before I ever touched him. "Uh-uh. Me first."

"Why do you get to go first?"

"We're doing this fair," he said. "We're going alphabetically."

Being the one done to wasn't in my repertoire. I wasn't very good at it. I kept moving him, and he'd growl and grab my hands and hold them down, harder every time. I liked that, so I didn't even try to reform. No secret to me the kind of things his strength did to my brain and my body, why should it be a secret to him?

Having him on me was good the same way watching somebody else do the dishes is good, only with, you know, nakedness and touching. No mercy, no control, just Jim getting down to it, taking it all on himself, just like I wanted it.

Just like we both wanted it, from the way he looked at me, hot, the way his hands closed over my wrists like cuffs without keys when he dragged them over my head. He stretched them high and I turned my spine into a bridge, arched up so he had no choice but to press down and flatten me out. I made him use his whole weight to hold me down, and even then I moved under him. Even then.

"'On me the tempest falls.'" I was drunk on being able to talk, to say anything at all. Stupid, meaningless things, whatever I wanted. "'O holy Mother Earth, O air and sun, behold me. I am wronged.'"

"Shakespeare?"

"Too easy."

"Maybe next time."

"It was Aeschylus."

"You know what? I stopped caring right after you said it."

"Said what?" I said, and he smiled.

He put a finger--one callused fingertip--on a spot just beneath my ear. He held it there, watching me try to suck in enough air to stay conscious while still looking moderately cool. It wasn't hot or cold, it was just there, scratchy and gentle and _there_, resting on my skin like it planned to stay awhile. I was fine, I was, breathing and everything, until I looked up and found his eyes waiting for mine. He smiled, slow and easy and he said, "I'm not going to touch you there for a while."

And he moved his hand away, and _that's_ when that spot started to burn.

I was in trouble.

"So where are you going to touch me?"

"Everyplace else."

"There's a lot of me, Jim," I said. "Don't make promises you can't keep."

"You got no faith," he said, and because I'd doubted him, he felt called upon to prove himself.

"Jim."

"Mother of God."

"No, but lucky you, you get a second guess."

"What?" His voice was deep and broken in places, and I had this Hallmark moment where I thought hey, that's not too far from what his heart's like. I had to laugh at myself but I also had to pull my arms loose and wrap them around him as far as they'd go, pull him in. Had to stroke at his hair and whisper things to him about how good he was to me, how good his heart was and how I was going to take care of it, how I always took care of all the stuff that was mine.

Halfway through he put one hand over my mouth and the other over my balls and said, kindly, "What'd you stop moving for?"

I shut up. We could talk about it later.

His hands moved over me with the patience of glaciers, melting muscles underneath my skin wherever they touched. I should've been getting crazy, should've been begging for it, but he spread calm over me and I turned lazy. I couldn't have faked a decent effort for all the mint chocolate ice cream in the world and I told him so, twice--once in the interest of full disclosure and the second time because he smiled when I said it the first. A real smile from Jim is like getting the grant you forgot you applied for, like Ed McMahon showing up on your doorstep, like a banana split you don't have to share with anybody.

It's worth working for, and I'm a dedicated kind of guy.

Jim played with me the way a kid plays with the cool box his favorite toy came out of. I had fingers tangled up in my hair, pressing into my lips, stroking my tongue. He touched my nipples with fingertips wet from my own mouth and blew on them till they ached, till I couldn't be quiet anymore. I wanted him to touch me in that one spot, but he wouldn't, just smiled, and that's when I knew how this was going, how it was going to go.

I closed my eyes over that knowledge and held it in my mind until everything else vacated the premises and all I could think was _Yes, okay, yeah, that's how I want it. That's how I want it, too. You get us there, I'll get us home._ Yeah, I could definitely work with that.

Time stretched out. I didn't remember there being that many seconds in a minute. I didn't remember seconds taking that long to go by. Jim was hot-wired into my nerve endings, so close I felt his hands before he ever decided to touch me. I kept my eyes shut and in my mind I saw thin silver filaments coming out of his fingertips, burrowing into me, sliding under my skin.

"What?" he demanded. He didn't lift his head from my chest.

"Sorry." I killed the rest of the laughter before it could get out. "I was thinking about acupuncture."

He did look up then. He glared at me, lips pressed into a thin line. "Acupuncture."

"Yeah. You know, they stick these needles in you and it makes you feel better."

"This is what you think of during sex? People sticking needles into your skin? Have you talked to anybody about this?"

"I'm talking to you," I said.

"I wish you'd stop."

"I can do that. It's just that you had these silver wires coming out of your--"

"For Christ's sake, Blair."

"It was relevant," I said, but by that point he'd stopped listening.

I tried to remember back to a time before the first time, when he was just this weird guy living upstairs, my buddy Jim--just for kicks, just to see if I could put my mind there while my body was here. I had to bite down on my tongue to keep from laughing again, and even that didn't work, so I lay there laughing under him, powerless to stop it, him looking down at me with all this love and horniness and resignation. The guy he'd fallen for was in reality this freak who couldn't stop laughing even when there was a hand on his dick.

Even when it was doing the things his hand was.

Okay, I could stop laughing, apparently, I could stop laughing on a dime.

He went over me warm and slow, and he looked up at the wall in front of him like he expected it to commiserate. And he was grinning. Did I mention that? He was grinning.

When it hit, it hit hard. I was distracted, his hands were so good in so many places, and I wasn't thinking about it, I didn't think I was there yet.

Jim, though. Jim knew.

He pressed down on me, hard and slick with sweat, breathing so hard I thought he might hurt himself. There was this shine in his eyes, bright and warm, but I only saw it for a second before his mouth was on mine, hot as the rest of him, and his tongue was on mine, going in hard and deep. He tasted like spearmint toothpaste and he smelled like Old Spice and when he put his hand between us and wrapped it around me, it was all of those things together that ripped me apart.

Jim took a little longer. I spiraled back down into myself, slow and hazy, and when my body and mind were on the same page again I pushed him over onto his back and swallowed him down.

He didn't make a sound, but his body arched up and I had to hold him, almost had to cradle him so I could keep going. He wrapped himself around me, said my name so many time I lost count, and tried to be still. The heat of him seared my tongue, my mouth, but it was a good kind of heat. It was for Jim, and in that way it was for me, too, because in the end I wanted what he wanted and if it took us six months in hell to figure that out, those months were worth it.

Before it was over I shifted up and lay along his side, looking down at his face while I ran my hands over his body. I had to watch him, because he'd never let me see this before, he'd turned away or turned me away or closed his eyes and dealt with it on his own terms. This I had to do, I had to see his eyes when I put my hand on him, stroked over him, worked him the way I wanted. When it took him, I pressed close and never looked away, not once. I saw his face twist, and the tendons in his throat stood out in sharp relief, and his back came up of the bed in a perfect arch and that's when I took his mouth, licked into it and kissed him while he pulsed under my hand, warm and slick.

When he was still, I grabbed the sweater he'd folded up so carefully and wiped my hand on it.

I must have killed him, because he saw it and he didn't say a word.

  
   


* * *

  
   


I woke up sometime before sunrise, cold, tense for a reason I couldn't really explain. I was so chilled I couldn't feel my own hands, and I couldn't remember where I was, but Jim was there. He wrapped himself around me and held on, riding it out with me, talking to me in a quiet, easy whisper.

"What is it?" he said. "What can I do?"

But there wasn't anything. It was just reaction. Shock, maybe. Fear. I had a lot to hold onto, and I wasn't really sure of my chances.

Jim held on. And he kept holding on, saying things to me he'd never said before, until I turned to him and pushed my face into his neck and started touching him. Soft and silent, in the dark.

He stopped me. Pushed me back. "Hey, come on. We don't have to do it this way. C'mon, Blair...."

"I want it this way."

"You don't. I don't." I found a good spot and heard his breath hiss into his lungs. "Don't...."

"It's okay. See? Talking, here," I said. "Tell me what to do. What do you like?"

"What you're doing. That's... yeah. That's very...."

"Good."

"Yeah."

So, darkness. But no silence that time, not between us or inside us, because Jim was right that we didn't have to do it that way anymore. I touched him where he wanted to be touched, and I made him tell me every step of the way, and by the time he found what he was looking for I was okay again. I held him while he shook and tried to breathe air with lungs that didn't want to work anymore, and I told him how much I loved him, how good he felt, how good he made me feel.

At the end of it he took one of my hands and knotted my fingers in his. He held them between us and said, all nervous and beautiful and strong, "This is us."

I squeezed so hard I thought my fingers would break. I didn't care if they did.

_This is us_.

  
   


* * *

  
   


My inner carnivore dragged me kicking and screaming into consciousness, responding with disturbing enthusiasm to the smells of frying bacon and brewing coffee. I didn't open my eyes at first, but I could feel the sunlight on my lids. It was good for a few minutes to just lie there, soaking in the warmth of the blankets and the thought of breakfast.

My doors were open. I knew it because I could hear Jim shuffling around in the kitchen: the squeak the fridge made when he opened it, the clinking of a spoon inside a mug, the crack of an egg against the side of an empty pan. Jim would've heard a lot more if our positions were reversed. Automatically I thought about the distance from the source of the sounds and the obstacles in between; automatically I plotted myself on a graph next to Jim--Blair Sandburg, a control group of one.

And then I opened my eyes and swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. That kind of thing... wasn't my thing, anymore.

I grunted something I meant to sound warm and loving on my way to a much-needed shower. The water was good, so hot it turned my skin red and clouded the tiny room with steam. Later, clean and warm, I just leaned against the wall for a while, breathing in the heat.

When I was done, and dressed, I headed out into the kitchen. Breakfast was laid out on the table, complete with coffee and eggs just the way I like them.

"Hey," I said. "You planning to share?"

He looked up from his book, the same one he'd had the night before. A smile opened his face up, and when he was smiling like that, I had to touch him. Just a brush of my hand over his shoulder as I passed to get to my chair, but the warmth of him was good. It made things solid.

"I will if you will," he said.

And that was when I spotted the lockbox beside my plate.

"It's early for this." I looked over at him with a faint hope that we could let this ride for a while, but he was still Jim and I was still me and the hope died the second I met his eyes.

"We need to get some stuff sorted out." Jim tilted his head to the side, and jerked his chin toward the box. "That thing's what, five pages from done?"

"Two. About that. Maybe a little more. Two, give or take. But Jim, I meant what I said."

"So did I."

"Can I have some bacon?"

He popped a slice into his mouth and slid the plate further away from me. I took that as a 'no.'

"I told you last night, it's mostly bullshit."

"You also told me it was an accurate representation of reality."

"An ethically fuzzy accurate representation of reality, I think I said. No, I'm pretty sure, that's what I said."

"You said a lot of things. I plan to hold you to maybe half of them. Come on, Sandburg, we're talking about your life here."

"Jim, I'd really like some bacon."

He let me have it this time. Eggs, too. Only when I had them, I found out I couldn't put anything in my mouth because my stomach was tied up in a little knot of post-coital angst and apprehension. He'd said he didn't care what I did with it, but he'd also said we were the paper. The idea of leaving it forever two pages from over had a certain symbolic appeal.

He watched me not eating, and I watched him not reading, and our breakfast got cold while it waited on the table between us.

"It's a rotten paper, Jim."

He shrugged. "Write a good ending."

"Maybe I don't want it to end."

"Maybe I don't want to support you for the rest of my life."

"Hey, who's asking?"

He rolled his eyes at me. "Finish the damn paper, Sandburg. Graduate. Get a job."

"You sound like my mom."

"That's not what you said last night."

"I want to finish it."

And the crazy-surprising thing about that was, it was true. I wanted to finish it because it was mine, and it was about Jim, and because it needed finishing, that was just who I was. I hadn't changed that much, not so much that I didn't want to finish what I started.

"Fuck," I said. "I have no idea how to end it."

He nodded sagely, and opened up his book. "Just write what you know."

"I don't know anything!"

"Shouldn't take long then. When you're done, we can go to the movies."

I looked at him in total disbelief. He sat there unperturbed, totally resistant to all the evil hate vibes I was sending out at him, smiling like he'd won the lottery and blushing, too, while he was trying to find his place. It was another one of those looks I'd never seen on him before, funny and easy and embarrassed and totally psyched. I thought, _He's on today, and he knows it, we both know it, he's totally clued in._

"You're okay with this."

"I'm okay with it."

"What if I'm not?"

"Then you don't publish it. Or you do, maybe, I don't know. Do we have to nail it down right now?"

"Nope," I said, and that was the cool part. We didn't have to do anything we didn't want to.

"Hey." Jim reached across the table and picked up my hand, wound our fingers together. "You're my best friend, Sandburg."

My throat closed up. _I love you_, only in my terms, my language. Jim's not a bad linguist himself. I nodded, because I couldn't have said anything if my life depended on it, and looked down at my plate.

"You planning to eat that last piece of bacon?"

I shoved the plate toward him. "'With all my worldly goods.'"

He grinned, and I grinned back. It was a complicated thing, being happy. I was finding out it wasn't all one piece; it had component parts, things that had to go together.

And right in the middle of that, in the very center of that thought, I bought a clue of my own.

_This is what Jim looks like when he's in love_.


End file.
